A Survey of Automated Programming Hint Generation: The HINTS Framework

Automated tutoring systems offer the flexibility and scalability necessary to facilitate the provision of high-quality and universally accessible programming education. To realise the potential of these systems, recent work has proposed a diverse range of techniques for automatically generating feedback in the form of hints to assist students with programming exercises. This article integrates these apparently disparate approaches into a coherent whole. Specifically, it emphasises that all hint techniques can be understood as a series of simpler components with similar properties. Using this insight, it presents a simple framework for describing such techniques, the Hint Iteration by Narrow-down and Transformation Steps framework, and surveys recent work in the context of this framework. Findings from this survey include that (1) hint techniques share similar properties, which can be used to visualise them together, (2) the individual steps of hint techniques should be considered when designing and evaluating hint systems, (3) more work is required to develop and improve evaluation methods, and (4) interesting relationships, such as the link between automated hints and data-driven evaluation, should be further investigated. Ultimately, this article aims to facilitate the development, extension, and comparison of automated programming hint techniques to maximise their educational potential.

DExIE - An IoT-Class Hardware Monitor for Real-Time Fine-Grained Control-Flow Integrity

The Dynamic Execution Integrity Engine (DExIE) is a lightweight hardware monitor that can be flexibly attached to many IoT-class processor pipelines. It is guaranteed to catch both inter- and intra-function illegal control flows in time to prevent any illegal instructions from touching memory. The performance impact of attaching DExIE to a core depends on the concrete pipeline structure. In some especially suitable cases, extending a processor with DExIE will have no performance penalty. DExIE is real-time capable, as it causes no or only up to 10.4 % additional and then predictable pipeline stalls. Depending on the monitored processor’s size and structure, DExIE is faster than software-based monitoring and often smaller than a separate guard processor. We present not just the hardware architecture, but also the automated programming flow, and discuss compact adaptable storage formats to hold fine-grained control flow information.

An Approach to Automated Programming of Industrial Robots Based on Graphic Data

The article contains the design and implementation of a system for automatic program generation for an industrial robot, based on the graphical input recorded by camera. The content is divided into two parts. The first section deals with processing the visual data acquired from an external source to appropriate form, using edge identification and transformation from raster to vector image. The second part deals with the automatic program generation for industrial robot. The article describes different possible approaches to solution. The selected way of solution was implemented in real environment in a chosen programming language. The final section of the article presents the results of experiments, together with the overall evaluation of the results.

Possibilities for automated programming style assessment in informatics olympiads

Programming Style is an important part of program quality and it should be taken into account while assessing programs designedby competitors in informatics. In InternationalOlympiad in Informatics grading is automated and based on testing results only, while programming style is not taken into account. However there exists practice in universities in programming courses where programming style of submitted programs is evaluated automatically. The paper reviews existing experience and discusses possibilities for automated grading of programming style in informatics olympiads.

A Critical Review on Recent Proposed Automated Programming Assessment Tool

Automated assessment tool for programming assignments has been discussed extensively in education technology ever since of its existence. The tool aims to reduce the work load of instructors as well as providing an instantfeedback to students in pertaining to assessing programming assignments. Myriad versions of the tool accompanied with multiple features has been proposed till this day in order to cater modern trend of education technologies. Many previous studies have analyse on these existing tools but not on recent one. This study have conducted a critical review on the recent proposed tool based on its pedagogical and technical aspect. As a result of this study, more recent proposed tool are identified and its challenging issues are also highlighted.

Recent Advances on Manipulator Trajectory Planning Methods

Background: Traditional manipulator requires professionals to write control programs for specific job requirements so that the end-effector of the manipulator can work following the control instructions. However, the flexibility of the manipulator is not high under the control of off-line programming. With the diversification of the job requirements, the complexity of the work environment has gradually increased. Therefore, the relevant scholars focused their research on the automatic trajectory planning method of the manipulator. They used some algorithms to plan optimal trajectories for the manipulator to automatically avoid obstacles in the complex environment. Researches show that the hybrid optimal trajectory with parameter optimization such as time, energy and impact can be planned by automated programming under some constraint conditions. The trajectory planning is helpful to improve the automation and working efficiency of manipulators for the development of intelligent manufacturing. Objective: Providing references for researchers from related fields by reviewing recent advances of the manipulator trajectory planning. Methods: This paper reviews the latest patents and current representative articles related to the manipulator trajectory planning. The key methods of some references are introduced in several aspects of the algorithm, innovation and principle. Results: Researches on the manipulator trajectory planning in recent 10 years are reviewed. The differences between algorithms in latest patents and current articles are introduced and analyzed and the future developments and potential problems of the manipulator trajectory optimization are discussed. Conclusion: The manipulator trajectory planning reduces complicated operator and hard programming tasks, improving the intelligence of robots and the work efficiency. Current researches focus on collision- free, parameter-optimized and high-efficiency solution which can be used to solve the problem of the end-trajectory planning of the manipulator in the complicated space with obstacles. The aspects that need to be improved in the future include: algorithm reliability, operational security and intelligence, human-computer interaction, efficient simulation, and so on. More patents on manipulator trajectory planning should be invented.