An Improvement of Value Trace Problems for Pointer Study in C Programming

In a lot of universities, $C$ programming is the first computer language in the curricula before teaching advanced languages, data structure and algorithms, and computer architecture. To assist self-study of C programming through code reading, we have studied the value trace problem (VTP). In a VTP instance, a source code and a set of questions are given to students. Each question asks the actual value of an important variable or an output message in the code. The correctness of any answer is marked through string matching with the correct one. However, our previous applications of the generated 40 VTP instances to 25 students found that they could not solve well the instances related to pointer. In this paper, we present an improvement of the VTP instances on pointer by adding hints, changing questions, and generating new instances. Then, it was found that the same students could solve them far better than before.