A Study of Blank Element Selection Rules for Element Fill-in-blank Problem in JavaScript-Based Web-client Programming
Huiyu Qi, Nobuo Funabiki, Khaing Hsu Wai, May Zin Htun, // Flasma Veronicha Hendryanna, Yan Watequlis Syaifudin

Department of Information and Communication Systems, Okayama University, Okayama, Japan

Department of Information Technology, State Polytechnic of Malang, Malang, Indonesia

Abstract

Nowadays, web applications take central roles in computer systems. Then, web-client programming using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript has become important to introduce logics and dynamics for interactive human interfaces on web browsers.
Previously, we have presented the element fill-in-blank problem (EFP) for its self-study by novice students, and generated 47 instances on basic and applicative grammar topics. An EFP instance consists of a source code where some elements of tags, functions, or messages may be blanked, and the corresponding web page screenshots, and requests to fill in the blanks by referring to the screenshots. The correctness of any answer is marked through string matching.
However, these blanks were manually selected by considering the importance of elements and the uniqueness of correct answers. Thus, the quality of a generated EFP instance strongly depends on skills and preferences of the builder, and the uniqueness may not be satisfied.
In this paper, we study blank element selection rules for generating a new EFP instance from a source code in web-client programming. For this purpose, we analyze the blanks in the EFP instances in previous studies.
For evaluations, we confirmed that one rule can be applied to each blank in them and a new EFP instance can be generated by using the rules. In the next study, we will implement the automatic EFP generator based on the rules.

Keywords: web-client programming, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, element fill-in-blank, blank element selection, rule

Topic: Computer engineering, vision and application