A tree inclusion analyzer for examining introductory programming codes

This paper presents a framework for building mechanisms for automatic analysis of introductory programming exercises. This framework consists of a structure that provides the combination of different types of analysis mechanisms, providing the configuration of various families of analyzers. One of these analyzers is based on a tree inclusion mechanism that verifies whether a particular structure (i.e. combination of language constructs) is contained in a solution. For evaluating our proposal, we conduct a study with 232 submissions from two introductory programming classes. The results indicate the following groups of students: one group that failed on syntactic and functional correctness stages; eight groups that submitted solutions with similar structure. Finally, the results provide evidences that is possible to identify different templates of correct solutions.