Uma abordagem unificada para especificar e checar restrições em múltiplas linguagens de programação por meio de um analisador estático no contexto de um juiz on-line

Abstract

The teaching and learning process of computer programming is a complex task which requires a lot of practice and creativity. Usually, there are numerous solutions to the same problem. Therefore, the student needs that his solutions are evaluated quickly for a faster and effective learning. To face these challenges, teachers and students can rely on resources from the evolution of Information and Communication Technology. Virtual learning environments and online judge systems are attractive alternatives used in this context. This work presents a unified approach to specify and check source code restrictions supported by a static analyzer. Although current tools are able to indicate if the program produced the expected output from a given input, not all are able to determine if the student used (or not) a given programming language construct, such as creating a function and using it in the program. Among those that are capable, there are problems that were solved in the approach proposed in this work, such as: ease of use, unified approach and degree of flexibility. In addition, this work presents an analysis of the database of The Huxley with the purpose of discovering the main restrictions of source code used by the teachers and attended by the students. This analysis was done based on data obtained from the use of the developed static analyzer and in conjunction with a survey applied to the teachers of introduction to programming with the purpose of knowing the main restrictions that would be used by them if they had a tool to specify and check restrictions.