Customizable and scalable automated assessment of C/C++ programming assignments

The correction of exercises in programming courses is a laborious task that has traditionally been performed in a manual way. This situation, in turn, delays the access by students to feedback that can contribute significantly to their training as future professionals. Over the years, several approaches have been proposed to automate the assessment of students' programs. Static analysis is a known technique that can partially simulate the process of manual code review performed by lecturers. As such, it is a plausible option to assess whether students' solutions meet the requirements imposed on the assignments. However, implementing a personalized analysis beyond the rules included in existing tools may be a complex task for the lecturer without a mechanism that guides the work. In this paper, we present a method to provide automated and specific feedback to immediately inform students about their mistakes in programming courses. To that end, we developed the CAC++ library, which enables constructing tailored static analysis programs for C/C++ practices. The library allows for great flexibility and personalization of verifications to adjust them to each particular task, overcoming the limitations of most of the existing assessment tools. Our approach to providing specific feedback has been evaluated for a period of three academic years in a course related to object-oriented programming. The library allowed lecturers to reduce the size of the static analysis programs developed for this course. During this period, the academic results improved and undergraduates positively valued the aid offered when undertaking the implementation of assignments.Universidad de Cádiz, Grant/Award Numbers: sol-201500054192-tra, sol-201600064680-tra; Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, Grant/Award Number: RTI2018-093608-B-C33; European Regional Development Fun

Oii-web: An interactive online programming contest training system

In this paper we report our experience, related to the online training for the Italian and International Olympiads in Informatics. We developed an interactive online system, based on CMS, the grading system used in several major programming contests including the International Olympiads in Informatics (IOI), and used it in three distinct context: training students for the Italian Olympiads in Informatics (OII), training teachers in order to be able to assist students for the OII, and training the Italian team for the IOI. The system, that is freely available, proved to be a game changer for the whole italian olympiads in informatics ecosystem: in one year, we almost doubled the participation to OII, from 13k to 21k secondary school students. The system is developed basing on the Contest Management System (CMS, http://cms- dev.github.io/), so it is highly available to extensions supporting, for instance, the pro- duction of feedback on problems solutions submitted by trainees. The system is also freely available, with the idea of allowing for support to alternative necessities and developmen

EUROMOD: the European Union tax-benefit microsimulation model

This paper aims to provide an introduction to the current state of the art of EUROMOD, the European Union tax-benefit microsimulation model. It explains the original motivations for building a multi-country EU-wide model and summarises its current organisation. It provides an overview of EUROMOD components, covering its policy scope, the input data, the validation process and some technical aspects such as the tax-benefit programming language and the user interface. The paper also reviews some recent applications of EUROMOD and, finally, considers future developments

TLAD 2010 Proceedings:8th international workshop on teaching, learning and assesment of databases (TLAD)

This is the eighth in the series of highly successful international workshops on the Teaching, Learning and Assessment of Databases (TLAD 2010), which once again is held as a workshop of BNCOD 2010 - the 27th International Information Systems Conference. TLAD 2010 is held on the 28th June at the beautiful Dudhope Castle at the Abertay University, just before BNCOD, and hopes to be just as successful as its predecessors.The teaching of databases is central to all Computing Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems and Information Technology courses, and this year, the workshop aims to continue the tradition of bringing together both database teachers and researchers, in order to share good learning, teaching and assessment practice and experience, and further the growing community amongst database academics. As well as attracting academics from the UK community, the workshop has also been successful in attracting academics from the wider international community, through serving on the programme committee, and attending and presenting papers.This year, the workshop includes an invited talk given by Richard Cooper (of the University of Glasgow) who will present a discussion and some results from the Database Disciplinary Commons which was held in the UK over the academic year. Due to the healthy number of high quality submissions this year, the workshop will also present seven peer reviewed papers, and six refereed poster papers. Of the seven presented papers, three will be presented as full papers and four as short papers. These papers and posters cover a number of themes, including: approaches to teaching databases, e.g. group centered and problem based learning; use of novel case studies, e.g. forensics and XML data; techniques and approaches for improving teaching and student learning processes; assessment techniques, e.g. peer review; methods for improving students abilities to develop database queries and develop E-R diagrams; and e-learning platforms for supporting teaching and learning