A Study of Two Types of Introductory Exercise Problems for Network Programming Learning with Python

Network programming is the act of writing computer codes for communications between programs or processes in different computers across networks. It is crucial for applications and services using networks, including e-commerce, gaming, and social media. However, university courses of educating it are very limited. As a result, it has become important to develop and offer IT tools to support self-studies of network programming by novices. In this paper, we present a study of two types of introductory exercise problems, namely, Grammar-concept Understanding Problem (GUP) and Comment Insertion Problem (CIP), for self-studies of five basic network protocols of TCP/IP, ARP, SMTP, POP3, and SSH with Python. A GUP instance requests to answer the keyword such as a library function in the given source code that corresponds to the grammar concept described in the question. A CIP instance requests to insert the comment at each blank of the code. String matching is adopted to mark any answer at the browser-based answer interface. Through solving them, it is expected to understand the meaning of important words and the code structure for network programming. As preliminary evaluations, we generated six GUP and CIP instances respectively, and assigned them to 10 students in Okayama University, Japan. The results confirmed that the proposal is proper for novices to learn network programming with Python.