ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF A WEB-ENABLED PROBLEM BASED LEARNING (PBL) SYSTEM

Abstract

The work aims at providing a better pedagogy that helps in enhancing students’ learning in the field of
programing. A teacher designs some problems for the students. Each problem contains proper description and
resources with standard PHP output. Students can practice and submit answers pertaining to the problem with
the help of the relevant resources and standard output. A hybrid methodology was employed in the design and
development of the system. The system was implemented using MySQL server database engine and Hypertext
Pre-processor scripting language embedded on Dreamweaver GUI. The result is a web-based socioconstructivist
PBL model which gives students the opportunity of writing and submitting PHP codes to an
administrator who guides the students towards achieving the best solution to a given problem set. The system
provides the facility for the students to practice and experiment on coding with real-time error reporting
mechanism. Students have the ability of editing codes repeatedly, comparing their outputs with the standard
output within the specific duration. For grading, a tutor evaluates the student’s code and awards marks
accordingly. The system helps the students to engage in self-learning of PHP based on the real problems