An Implementation of Element Fill-in-Blank Problems for Code Understanding Study of JavaScript-Based Web-Client Programming

At present, web-client programming using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is essential in web application systems to offer dynamic behaviors in web pages. With rich libraries and short coding features, it becomes common in developing user interfaces. However, the teaching course is not common in universities due to limited time. Therefore, self-study tools are strongly desired to promote it in societies. Previously, we have studied the programming learning assistant system (PLAS) as a programming self-study platform. In PLAS, among several types of programming problems, the element fill-in-blank problem (EFP) has been implemented for code understanding study of C and Java programming. In an EFP instance, the blank elements in a source code should be filled in with the proper words, where the correctness is checked by string matching. In this paper, we implement EFP for web-client programming in PLAS. In a web page, HTML and CSS define the components with tags in the document object model (DOM), and JavaScript offers their dynamic changes with libraries, which are blanked in EFP. Besides, a set of web page screenshots are given to help the solution. For evaluations, the generated 21 EFP instances were assigned to 20 master students in Okayama University. By analyzing their solution results, the effectiveness was confirmed for JavaScript programming learning.