Knowledge Unit Discovery For Programming On Network

With the development of computer science education, programming tutoring which is one of the core curriculums is becoming more and more important. In these years, ACM/ICPC (ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest) has become a very popular activity among university students. More and more universities are taking part in this contest, and the contest itself becomes a good chance for exchanging teaching experience among different universities. In normal tutoring, programming problems are put on the Internet for downloading and exercising, the solutions correspond to these problems are submitted to the online-judge system.With the development of online exercising, there are more and more archives of problems for programming practice on the Internet, solutions which are used for solving these problems are also more and more. The problems in these archives, however, are not organized effectively for programming tutoring. Teachers may hope that the problems are grouped into a sequence of tutoring units, each of them consisting of several problems as related examples that are focused on the same knowledge concepts. On the other hand, for the purpose of supervising and supporting the personalize online-judge, teachers may hope to know the mainstream knowledge and different methods on solving a specific problem.For the purpose of getting knowledge of different methods and separating problems into different knowledge units, in this paper, we propose a method based on Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) to discover the knowledge behind the source codes of the problem solutions and knowledge units. First, by analyzing different source codes for solving the same problem, we get the mainstream knowledge for different problems. Then, with different problems'mainstream knowledge as problem-solving character set, by constructing formal contexts for programming tutoring, the FCA is applied to build formal concept lattices, from which knowledge units for tutoring can be discovered one after another, forming a sequence of tutoring units.