Proposal of a Method for Generating C Program Tracing Tasks

This abstract represents our full paper categorized under the ‘Research to Practice’ category. Program tracing tasks ask about the behavior of a program, such as “the next expression to be executed” and “the value of variables during the execution of that expression”. The program tracing exercise system developed by Tomoto et al. provides an environment for efficiently conducting exercises using program tracing tasks. This system poses questions to learners based on program tracing tasks, adapting to their answers. However, implementing questions for new programs in this system requires considerable effort and time. Therefore, we propose a method to automatically generate tracing tasks by identifying the targets of questions from the program and following predefined question guidelines. Specifically, we first create a model that formalizes the tracing tasks. This model consists of the targets of questions, their execution order, and execution conditions. Then, we develop a method to generate data from the program to implement this model. This method derives an abstract syntax tree from the program, identifies question targets based on the attribute values of nodes, and specifies the order and conditions for executing questions based on the relationships between nodes. Consequently, tracing tasks can be generated by implementing the model with the generated data. We found that tracing tasks could be generated using the proposed model and the data extracted by the proposed method from programs extracted from a programming exercise textbook.