Development of a Hint Suggestion System Based on Student's Learning Status in Server Management Exercises

ABSTRACT In recent years, more and more server administration exercises have been conducted at universities. Some students get stuck on the answer to a task. In this case, the student requests a hint for the task. The teacher hears the student, assesses the progress, and offers a hint. Also, teachers want students to conduct trial and error on a task before asking for hints. Many students ask for hints during exercises, which is a burden for teachers. We develop a system that presents hints based on the student's learning status. The teacher registers the learning status and corresponding hints in the system in advance. The student's command input/output and edited files are monitored by the system to check the student's progress. The system can suggest many hints based on learning status. As a result of the evaluation experiment, unnecessary hints were not presented to the students. Also, the system can guide students to conduct trial and error in the learning situation the teacher expects. In this paper, we describe the developed system and the results of evaluation experiments using the system.