ELP - a web envrionment for learning to program

Computer-based tutoring systems that can coach students in solving introductory programming problems have significant potential for improving the quality of programming education and reducing the instructor’s work load. The purpose of this paper is to describe the current development status of the innovative Environment for Learning to Program (ELP) which provides an interactive webbased environment for teaching programming to first year Information Technology students at Queensland University of Technology (QUT). ELP allows students to undertake programming exercises by “filling in the blanks” of a partial Java program presented in a web page. The system then compiles the completed program and returns the resulting class to students in Java ARchive format (JAR) if successful, otherwise helpful messages concerning compilation errors are returned.