A Concept of Agent-based Learning Support System for C Programming

The programming is one of the most important factors in the education of computer literacy. However, in the initial learning of the programming, many students often have faced a simple problem, like syntax-error by careless or miss typing. Therefore, they feel that the programming is too hard. The most important problem is the student can't take advantage of the error messages with displayed from the computer. These messages are difficult to understand for beginners because the message only indicates a syntactic error and where it occurred. We propose the support system for the C language programming on the UNIX by using agent technology. This system monitors the error message from the compiler. It analyzes, rewrites the acquired message, and reports to the student and the teacher on the network. The teacher can improve the teaching way by finding category of error. The student customizes these messages, and they can use the suitable one at each level. Moreover, these messages send to other students by communication line of each agent. Consequently, many students are able to use these useful messages; they can select the most preferable message from the collection of the agent. We executed the preliminary experiment; the improvement of efficiency to the complication work was able to be confirmed.