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EvoParsons: design, implementation and preliminary evaluation of evolutionary Parsons puzzle

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Abstract

The automated design of a set of practice problems that co-adapts to a population of learners is a challenging problem. Fortunately, coevolutionary computation offers a rich framework to study interactions between two co-adapting populations of teachers and learners. This framework is also relevant in scenarios in which a population of students solve practice exercises that are synthesized by an evolutionary algorithm. In this study, we propose to leverage coevolutionary optimization to evolve a population of Parsons puzzles (a relatively recent new type of practice exercise for novice computer programmers). To this end, we start by experimenting with successive simulations that progressively introduce the characteristics that we anticipate finding in our target application. Using these simulations, we refine a set of guidelines that capture insights on how to successfully coevolve Parsons puzzles. These guidelines are then used to implement the proposed “EvoParsons” software, with which we conduct preliminary evaluations on real human students enrolled in an introductory Java programming course at the University of South Florida. We also propose several quantitative metrics to assess the quality of puzzles produced by EvoParsons. Both simulations and experiments establish the feasibility of evolving pedagogically relevant practice problems that cover most of the dimensions underlying the interactions between problems and students. In addition, a generation-by-generation detailed analysis of the evolving population of Parsons puzzles confirms the occurrence of incremental improvements that can be explained in pedagogical terms.

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Notes

  1. Implementations of algorithms, experiments’ configuration files, and data analysis scripts available in the project’ repository at https://sourceforge.net/p/evotutoring/code/HEAD/tree/publications/.

  2. See https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/artifact-review-badgingfordetails.

  3. Available at https://sourceforge.net/projects/jade/.

  4. The course material is freely available at http://cereal.forest.usf.edu/edu/COP2512/ so that the reader may have access to all details regarding the material to which students were exposed, prior to using our software.

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Acknowledgements

This material is based in part upon work supported by the Association for Computing Machinery’s SIGCSE Special Projects 2015 award, and the National Science Foundation under awards #1504634, #1502564, and #1503834. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. USF Information Technology students contributed to the software development efforts. Paul Burton implemented the original proof of concept software during his IT Senior Project in spring 2015, and refined it under OPS contract during summer 2015. Stephen Kozakoff extended the prototype and connected it to Epplets.org as part of his MSIT graduate practicum in fall 2015 and spring 2016.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of South Florida, 4202 E. Fowler Avenue, Tampa, FL, USA

    A. T. M. Golam Bari & Alessio Gaspar

  2. Institute for Simulation & Training, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA

    R. Paul Wiegand

  3. The Citadel, 171 Moultrie Street, Charleston, SC, USA

    Jennifer L. Albert

  4. 119 Amory St., Cambridge, MA, USA

    Anthony Bucci

  5. Ramapo College of New Jersey, 505 Ramapo Valley Road, Mahwah, NJ, USA

    Amruth N. Kumar

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  1. A. T. M. Golam Bari
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Correspondence to A. T. M. Golam Bari.

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Bari, A.T.M.G., Gaspar, A., Wiegand, R.P. et al. EvoParsons: design, implementation and preliminary evaluation of evolutionary Parsons puzzle. Genet Program Evolvable Mach 20, 213–244 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10710-019-09343-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10710-019-09343-7

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