Generating random programming problems : A formal grammar based approach

Abstract: Enrollment in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and other open distance education is increasing and this requires large numbers of problems for students to learn from. Additionally, students learning programming benefit from practicing their skills on programming problems. Researchers have turned to automatically generating problems for this reason, although rarely within the domain of computer science. Those that are within that domain are limited in the variety of tasks they can generate. This means that students must come up with their own practice or rely on educators to create them manually, which is a demanding task. This research demonstrates a tool that can generate a suite of randomized programming problems to challenge students from instructor-defined templates. The tool will also come with an evaluation program to provide relevant statistics that instructors can use to evaluate the variety and complexity of problems in their suite.