Integrating textbooks with smart interactive content for learning programming

Online textbooks with interactive content emerged as a popular medium for learning programming and other computer science topics. While the textbook component supports acquisition of programming concepts by reading, various types of “smart” interactive learning content such as worked examples, code animations, Parson's puzzles, and coding problems allow students to immediately practice and master the newly learned concepts. This paper attempts to automate the time-consuming manual process of augmenting textbooks with “smart” interactive content. We introduce an ontology-based approach that can link fragment of text with “smart” content activities, demonstrate its application to two practical linking cases, and present the results of its pilot evaluation.