A Knowledge-Based Method for Designing Knowledge Querying Systems in Computer Programming Education

Computer programming knowledge is fundamental in information technology education. Supporting students in querying programming knowledge is therefore important for teaching and digital transformation. To develop such systems, programming knowledge must be modeled and organized into a knowledge-base, and an expressive query language is required to capture diverse learner information needs. Existing studies on knowledge representation and query languages remain incomplete, particularly for representing programming language knowledge. This paper proposes a combined knowledge representation model for computer programming together with a query language tailored to the proposed model. We also investigate query parsing and forward chaining inference mechanisms to query execution. The approach is implemented in a programming knowledge querying system and evaluated with real information technology students. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and practical applicability of the proposed system.