Abstract

As programming education has become more widespread, helping novices fix bugs remains a significant challenge. While various support methods have been studied, implementing them in educational settings requires customization of specific teaching materials, which demands time and technical resources. This study focuses on the fact that teaching materials are used repeatedly in educational settings. If error information from previous uses of the same teaching materials can help debug similar errors that occur later, it enables debugging support tailored to specific materials by simply conducting classes and collecting error data. To test this hypothesis, a system is proposed that automatically collects error information, searches for similar errors, and suggests appropriate solutions. Experiments were conducted using this system by collecting error data from programming practice courses at Kindai University in 2021 and 2022. The results showed that past error information was able to effectively support debugging for approximately 30% of future errors, confirming the potential of this approach as a new method to support novice programming learning.

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