Methods of Forming Learner Groups for Mutual Teaching among Leaners with Different Situations in Programming Exercise

In response to the growing demand for developing programming skills, opportunities for providing programming exercises have been increasing at educational institutions such as universities. Instructors must be attentive to learners’ progress and situations to provide effective support. However, there are limits to supporting a large number of learners by a small number of instructors. Peer or group-based learning has been recognized as a promising approach to address these challenges, but most existing methods rely on static group formation based on pre-exercise information. We developed methods for forming dynamic learning groups that leverage learners’ current situations for effective peer-assisted learning. This paper mainly describes the dynamic formation of learner groups taking into account multiple factors such as whether learners are struggling and the similarity between source codes. We also describe the experiments on forming learner groups and discuss the basic effectiveness of the proposed methods on the basis of the experimental results.