A Problem Generator to Learn Expression Evaluation in CS I, And its Effectiveness

Introductory Computer Science students often do not clearly understand the concepts of operator precedence and associativity, and make mistakes when they write and evaluate expressions. In order to help them learn better by solving problems, we have developed an applet that generates problems (henceforth called problet) and corrects the learner’s answers. In this paper, we will describe the design and implementation of this problet. Whereas problem-solving is known to improve learning, it is not clear that using online resources such as problets to practice problem-solving is quite as effective. Therefore, we conducted a controlled experiment on the effectiveness of using our problet. Results indicate that using the problet did improve learning by 18%. We will describe the experiment and present its results.