E-learning tools are gaining increasing relevance as facilitators in the task of learning how to program. This is mainly a result of the pandemic situation and consequent lockdown in several countries, which forced di...
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E-learning tools are gaining increasing relevance as facilitators in the task of learning how to program. This is mainly a result of the pandemic situation and consequent lockdown in several countries, which forced distance learning. Instant and relevant feedback to students, particularly if coupled with gamification, plays a pivotal role in this process and has already been demonstrated as an effective solution in this regard. However, teachers still struggle with the lack of tools that can adequately support the creation and management of online gamified programming courses. Until now, there was no software platform that would be simultaneously open-source and general-purpose (i.e., not integrated with a specific course on a specific programming language) while featuring a meaningful selection of gamification components. Such a solution has been developed as a part of the Framework for Gamified programming Education (FGPE) project. In this paper, we present its two front-end components: FGPE AuthorKit and FGPE PLE, explain how they can be used by teachers to prepare and manage gamified programming courses, and report the results of the usability evaluation by the teachers using the platform in their classes.
Large-scale paper-based examinations (PBEs) in computing education frequently emphasize rote memorization, thereby misaligning instructional objectives with assessment techniques. Such incongruities hinder the prepara...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9798400716539
Large-scale paper-based examinations (PBEs) in computing education frequently emphasize rote memorization, thereby misaligning instructional objectives with assessment techniques. Such incongruities hinder the preparation of students for real world challenges in both industry and academia by inadequately evaluating higher-order cognitive abilities. Often, educators are deterred from implementing comprehensive skills assessment due to the perceived complexity and resource-intensive grading processes involved. To mitigate these limitations, this paper introduces an exam mode as an integral feature of the open-source learning platform Artemis. Designed for both local and cloud-based deployment, this exam mode incorporates anti-cheating protocols, automates the grading of diverse exercise types, and features double-blind manual grading to ensure assessment integrity. It fosters the evaluation of complex cognitive skills while substantially reducing the administrative load on faculty. This paper substantiates the effectiveness of the Artemis exam mode through widespread institutional adoption, demonstrated by over 50 successful computer-based examinations (CBEs). An in-depth case study involving 1,700 undergraduate software engineering students offers key insights, best practices, and lessons learned. This research not only pioneers the documentation of a secure, scalable, and reliable exam system at an institutional scale but also marks a seminal contribution to modernizing assessment strategies in computing education, with a particular focus on constructive alignment.
In programming education, instructors often supplement lectures with active learning experiences by offering programming lab sessions where learners themselves practice writing code. However, widely accessed instructi...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781450358866
In programming education, instructors often supplement lectures with active learning experiences by offering programming lab sessions where learners themselves practice writing code. However, widely accessed instructional programming screencasts are not equipped with assessment format that encourages such hands-on programming activities. We introduce Elicast, a screencast tool for recording and viewing programming lectures with embedded programming exercises, to provide hands-on programming experiences in the screencast. In Elicast, instructors embed multiple programming exercises while creating a screencast, and learners engage in the exercises by writing code within the screencast, receiving auto-graded results immediately. We conducted an exploratory study of Elicast with five experienced instructors and 63 undergraduate students. We found that instructors structured the lectures into small learning units using embedded exercises as checkpoints. Also, learners more actively engaged in the screencast lectures, checked their understanding of the content through the embedded exercises, and more frequently modified and executed the code during the lectures.
We present FGPE AuthorKit, a tool to author programming exercises featuring gamification elements that provide additional motivation for the students to intensify their learning effort. The tool allows the (1) creatio...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781450368742
We present FGPE AuthorKit, a tool to author programming exercises featuring gamification elements that provide additional motivation for the students to intensify their learning effort. The tool allows the (1) creation of exercises and their associated metadata, (2) selection and parameterization of adequate gamification techniques for a specific exercise or their collection, (3) design of the content structure and sequencing rules, and (4) importing and exporting the content in the formats of choice.
Introductory programming is an essential part of the curriculum in any engineering discipline in universities. However, for many beginning students, it is very difficult to learn. In particular, these students often g...
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Introductory programming is an essential part of the curriculum in any engineering discipline in universities. However, for many beginning students, it is very difficult to learn. In particular, these students often get stuck and frustrated when attempting to solve programming exercises. One way to assist beginning programmers to overcome difficulties in learning to program is to use intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) for programming, which can provide students with personalized hints of students' solving process in programming exercises. Currently, mostly these systems manually construct the domain models. They take much time to construct, especially for exercises with very large solution spaces. One of the major challenges associated with handling ITSs for programming comes from the diversity of possible code solutions that a student can write. The use of data-driven approaches to develop these ITSs is just starting to be explored in the field. Given that this is still a relatively new research field, many challenges are still remained unsolved. Our goal in this paper is to review and classify analysis techniques that are requested to generate data-driven hints in ITSs for programming. This work also aims equally to identify the possible future directions in this research field.
The increasing number of students in computer science courses leads to high efforts in manual assessment of exercises. Existing assessment systems are not designed for exercises with immediate feedback in large classe...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781450351034
The increasing number of students in computer science courses leads to high efforts in manual assessment of exercises. Existing assessment systems are not designed for exercises with immediate feedback in large classes. In this paper, we present an AuTomated assEssment Management System for interactive learning. ArTEMiS assesses solutions to programming exercises automatically and provides instant feedback so that students can iteratively solve the exercise. It is open source and highly scalable based on version control, regression testing and continuous integration. ArTEMiS offers an online code editor with interactive exercise instructions, is programming language independent and applicable to a variety of computer science courses. By using it, students gain experiences in version control, dependency management and continuous integration. We used ArTEMiS in 3 university and 1 online courses and report about our experiences. We figured out that ArTEMiS is suitable for beginners, helps students to realize their progress and to gradually improve their solutions. It reduces the effort of instructors and enhances the learning experience of students.
This study is proposed to determine lab practice preferences for computer-based laboratory exercises. A quantitative data is collected through survey questionnaires among computer engineering's students and lectur...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781509015962
This study is proposed to determine lab practice preferences for computer-based laboratory exercises. A quantitative data is collected through survey questionnaires among computer engineering's students and lecturers of Universiti Teknologi MARA Pulau Pinang. The survey items focus on four aspects;which are lab conduction, lab assessment, lab report writing and submission. A total of 87 correspondents have taken part in the survey. The findings of the survey indicate that they are preferred to use a computer-based tools system in conduction of computer-based laboratory exercises.
We present the TSW system (TestSystem Web), a web-based environment currently developed at the Rome I University, for the delivery of C programming exercises and their automatic correction. The core of the correction ...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9783642047534
We present the TSW system (TestSystem Web), a web-based environment currently developed at the Rome I University, for the delivery of C programming exercises and their automatic correction. The core of the correction system automatically tests the student's programs by applying unit-tests and/or by comparing the behaviour of the student's code to a reference implementation. Care is taken to avoid error propagation from a function to other functionally depending procedures by redirecting the failing calls to the corresponding reference implementation. The system "instruments" the student's code by using a code analyser and rewriter to handle instruction tracing and function calls redirection. The rewriter can be easily extended to develop other analysis instruments. As an example, we have developed: a code coverage tool that reports how much of the student's code has been visited during the test, a cyclomatic complexity evaluator to compare the number of different logic paths in the code, a tracker for stack depth usage to check for proper implementation of recursive functions, a function/loop execution counter for the evaluation of the execution complexity. Additional care is taken to capture disruptive errors that would abort the program: "segmentation faults" caused by wrong pointer dereferentiation, and time-out caused by run-away processes. With these tools, the teacher can write rich unit tests that can either compare the behaviour of the function under analysis with a reference implementation (e.g. by generating random input and comparing the results), or by submitting well-crafted special inputs to elicit special cases or by comparing the complexity and/or stack depth counters. Each test applied will then explain to the student what was the problem found. TSW is the core component of a future larger social knowledge project, in which students will cooperatively/competitively participate to the definition and test of each-other's programs,sharing ideas and lea
Rudimentary programming skills are essential to developing fundamental proficiency in computer science. However, learning programming techniques can be challenging and frustrating for many students. CodeWorkout is an ...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781450326056
Rudimentary programming skills are essential to developing fundamental proficiency in computer science. However, learning programming techniques can be challenging and frustrating for many students. CodeWorkout is an online learning environment that offers drill-and-practice exercises with novel social and adaptive scaffolding. Learners can track their progress on an assortment of computer science areas and skills while taking advantage of social features to discuss questions and help teach each other. Meanwhile, objective measurements of questions and teaching hints help promote the best, most effective content for learning. Our poster demonstrates how both computer science students and teachers benefit from joining the CodeWorkout community and taking advantage of its unique features.
This paper describes a formal experiment carried out to investigate the effect of the personality factor Openness to experience on the academic performance of students who practiced pair programming (PP) in higher edu...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781457703485
This paper describes a formal experiment carried out to investigate the effect of the personality factor Openness to experience on the academic performance of students who practiced pair programming (PP) in higher education. The experiment was carried out at the University of Auckland, using as subjects undergraduate students attending an introductory software programming course. Our results showed that differences in Openness level could significantly affect academic performance of students who pair programmed. In addition, our results also showed that most students gained higher satisfaction from the PP experience and their confidence level in solving programming exercises was also high.
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