Automatic marking of Shell programs for students coursework assessment

The number of students in any programming language course is usually large; more than 100 students is not uncommon in some universities. The member of staff teaching such a course has to mark, perhaps weekly, a very large number of program assignments. Manual marking and assessing is therefore an arduous task. The aim of this work is to describe a computer system for automatic marking and assessment of students' programs written in Unix Bourne Shell. In this study, a student's program will be assessed by testing its dynamic correctness and its maintainability. For dynamic correctness to be checked the program will be run against sets of input data supplied by the teacher, whereas for maintainability the student's program will be tested statically. The program text will be analysed, and its typographic style and its complexity measured. The typographic assessment in this system is adaptable to reflect the change of emphasis as a course progresses. This study presents the results generated from the assessment of a typical class of students in a Shell programming course. The experience with the development of the typographic assessment system has been generally positive. The results have shown that it is feasible to automate the assessment of this quality factor, as well as dynamic testing. Realistic grading can be achieved and useful information feedback can be obtained. The system is useful to both the students learning programming in Shell, (Arthur, L. J. and Burns, T., 1996) and the staff who are teaching the course. Although the work here is focused on the Bourne Shell, (Bourne, S. R., 1987) the study is still valid, with little or no change, to all other shells. The method used can also be applied, with some modification, to other programming languages. Furthermore this method is not limited to university and teaching, it can also be used in other fields for the purposes of software quality assessment

PathFinder: A Visualization eMathTeacher for Actively Learning Dijstra's algorithm

PathFinder is a new eMathTeacher for actively learning Dijkstra's algorithm. In Sanchez-Torrubia et al. (2007) the concept of eMathTeacher was defined and the minimum as well as some additional requirements were described. The tool presented here is an enhanced paradigm of this new concept on Computer Aided Instruction (CAI) resources: an application designed following the eMathTeacher philosophy for active eLearning. The highlighting new feature provided by this application is an animated algorithm visualization panel showing, on the code, the current step the student is executing and/or where there is a user's mistake within the algorithm running. PathFinder also includes another two interesting new features: an active framework area for the algorithm data and the capability of saving/retrieving the created graph

Investigating the Effectiveness of Active Interaction Tools on Student Learning

In this project, we investigate the effectiveness of active interaction animation tools for learning. We limit our scope to a particular computer science course that teaches graph algorithms on an undergraduate level. More specifically, we evaluate student understanding of basic graph algorithms when two kinds of interactive animation tools are used by the students to learn the algorithms: active interaction and passive interaction. We hypothesize that animations which engage students in active interaction are more effective and more beneficial to learning and comprehension than the animations which do not explicitly engage students in active interaction. We conduct an experiment and study the effects of these two kinds of interactive animation on learning effectiveness

Promoting Programming Learning. Engagement, Automatic Assessment with Immediate Feedback in Visualizations

The skill of programming is a key asset for every computer science student. Many studies have shown that this is a hard skill to learn and the outcomes of programming courses have often been substandard. Thus, a range of methods and tools have been developed to assist students’ learning processes. One of the biggest fields in computer science education is the use of visualizations as a learning aid and many visualization based tools have been developed to aid the learning process during last few decades. Studies conducted in this thesis focus on two different visualizationbased tools TRAKLA2 and ViLLE. This thesis includes results from multiple empirical studies about what kind of effects the introduction and usage of these tools have on students’ opinions and performance, and what kind of implications there are from a teacher’s point of view. The results from studies in this thesis show that students preferred to do web-based exercises, and felt that those exercises contributed to their learning. The usage of the tool motivated students to work harder during their course, which was shown in overall course performance and drop-out statistics. We have also shown that visualization-based tools can be used to enhance the learning process, and one of the key factors is the higher and active level of engagement (see. Engagement Taxonomy by Naps et al., 2002). The automatic grading accompanied with immediate feedback helps students to overcome obstacles during the learning process, and to grasp the key element in the learning task. These kinds of tools can help us to cope with the fact that many programming courses are overcrowded with limited teaching resources. These tools allows us to tackle this problem by utilizing automatic assessment in exercises that are most suitable to be done in the web (like tracing and simulation) since its supports students’ independent learning regardless of time and place. In summary, we can use our course’s resources more efficiently to increase the quality of the learning experience of the students and the teaching experience of the teacher, and even increase performance of the students. There are also methodological results from this thesis which contribute to developing insight into the conduct of empirical evaluations of new tools or techniques. When we evaluate a new tool, especially one accompanied with visualization, we need to give a proper introduction to it and to the graphical notation used by tool. The standard procedure should also include capturing the screen with audio to confirm that the participants of the experiment are doing what they are supposed to do. By taken such measures in the study of the learning impact of visualization support for learning, we can avoid drawing false conclusion from our experiments. As computer science educators, we face two important challenges. Firstly, we need to start to deliver the message in our own institution and all over the world about the new – scientifically proven – innovations in teaching like TRAKLA2 and ViLLE. Secondly, we have the relevant experience of conducting teaching related experiment, and thus we can support our colleagues to learn essential know-how of the research based improvement of their teaching. This change can transform academic teaching into publications and by utilizing this approach we can significantly increase the adoption of the new tools and techniques, and overall increase the knowledge of best-practices. In future, we need to combine our forces and tackle these universal and common problems together by creating multi-national and multiinstitutional research projects. We need to create a community and a platform in which we can share these best practices and at the same time conduct multi-national research projects easily.Siirretty Doriast

Advanced Technology for Engineering Education

This document contains the proceedings of the Workshop on Advanced Technology for Engineering Education, held at the Peninsula Graduate Engineering Center, Hampton, Virginia, February 24-25, 1998. The workshop was jointly sponsored by the University of Virginia's Center for Advanced Computational Technology and NASA. Workshop attendees came from NASA, other government agencies, industry and universities. The objectives of the workshop were to assess the status of advanced technologies for engineering education and to explore the possibility of forming a consortium of interested individuals/universities for curriculum reform and development using advanced technologies. The presentations covered novel delivery systems and several implementations of new technologies for engineering education. Certain materials and products are identified in this publication in order to specify adequately the materials and products that were investigated in the research effort. In no case does such identification imply recommendation or endorsement of products by NASA, nor does it imply that the materials and products are the only ones or the best ones available for this purpose. In many cases equivalent materials and products are available and would probably produce equivalent results