A Knowledge Sharing Platform for Learning from Others’ Code

Abstract

Learning from code written by other programmers is one of the most important ways of learning how to program. However, reading the code of a skilled programmer can be difficult for a beginner. Put differently, learning how to program can be challenging when the learners have different levels of programming proficiency. To lessen these difficulties, it is necessary to present model code that corresponds to the proficiency level of the learner. However, since proficiency levels in programming may vary by learner, preparing model code matching the proficiency level of every possible learner in advance may not always be practical. Therefore, we propose a platform for sharing knowledge among various learners participating in a given lecture. Functionality for sharing code alone may be insufficient for presenting code appropriate to the level of a given learner. Therefore, we also propose code quality indicators for understanding the degree of proximity in proficiency between a learner and a given programmer whose code is being used as a model. To this end, in this paper, we propose a platform with functionality for sharing, evaluating, and ranking written code. In addition, in order to understand the relationship between code written by other programmers and the behavior of the code at runtime, we propose a platform that involves programming a robot in order to allow the learner to visualize the behavior of the code as movement of the robot.