/λ/ - programming

I had this idea and I wonder what do you think about it.

There are these kind of exercises where you are given a program and optionally some kind of input and you have to answer what the result is or what is written out. I've mostly seen them used in exams but I had a course on logic programming with Prolog that had a website where you would get tons of random exercises like these, some just for unification, some for the whole evaluation. I did all of them and it really helped me form a mental model of how it actually works.

I think forming a model of how evaluation works is something a lot of beginner programmers struggle with, but I've never seen anything like this used to train them to think about it.

My idea was that you could copy the test-driven development approach to make an effective training program like this. Basically, you would assume that the student has the simplest mental model that could correctly answer all the previous exercises, give them an exercise that cannot be solved with it yet, and force them to correct their model. In practice every new feature would probably need multiple exercises, the actual amount possibly based on the student's speed of solving the exercise or maybe some self-reported difficulty metric. Of course this wouldn't replace the current teaching methods, but I think could be a good additional tool to somewhat quickly develop a good intuition of the target language.

What do you think? Is this really stupid or something that could work?