Exercise Solution Check Specification Language for Interactive Programming Learning Environments

Automatic checking of the correctness of students\u27 solutions of programming exercises for generating appropriate feedback is a necessary component of interactive programming learning environments. Although there are multiple ways of specifying such a check, ranging from mere string patterns to code written in general-purpose programming language, they all have their deficiencies, with the check specification being too verbose, too complicated, difficult to reuse, or very limited in its expressive capabilities. In this paper, a new language designed especially for this purpose is described. It provides both extension and replacement for RegEx-based pattern specification so that checks typical for programming exercise verification can be expressed in a concise and highly-readable manner

CS Circles: An In-Browser Python Course for Beginners

Computer Science Circles is a free programming website for beginners that is designed to be fun, easy to use, and accessible to the broadest possible audience. We teach Python since it is simple yet powerful, and the course content is well-structured but written in plain language. The website has over one hundred exercises in thirty lesson pages, plus special features to help teachers support their students. It is available in both English and French. We discuss the philosophy behind the course and its design, we describe how it was implemented, and we give statistics on its use.Comment: To appear in SIGCSE 201

A gentle transition from Java programming to Web Services using XML-RPC

Exposing students to leading edge vocational areas of relevance such as Web Services can be difficult. We show a lightweight approach by embedding a key component of Web Services within a Level 3 BSc module in Distributed Computing. We present a ready to use collection of lecture slides and student activities based on XML-RPC. In addition we show that this material addresses the central topics in the context of web services as identified by Draganova (2003)

Towards a Lightweight Approach for Modding Serious Educational Games: Assisting Novice Designers

Serious educational games (SEGs) are a growing segment of the education community’s pedagogical toolbox. Effectively creating such games remains challenging, as teachers and industry trainers are content experts; typically they are not game designers with the theoretical knowledge and practical experience needed to create a quality SEG. Here, a lightweight approach to interactively explore and modify existing SEGs is introduced, a toll that can be broadly adopted by educators for pedagogically sound SEGs. Novice game designers can rapidly explore the educational and traditional elements of a game, with a stress on tracking the SEG learning objectives, as well as allowing for reviewing and altering a variety of graphic and audio game elements

A Perspective Of Automated Programming Error Feedback Approaches In Problem Solving Exercises

Programming tools are meant for student to practice programming. Automated programming error feedback will be provided for students to self-construct the knowledge through their own experience. This paper has clustered current approaches in providing automated error programming feedback to the students during problem solving exercises. These include additional syntax error messages, solution template mismatches, test data comparison, assisted agent report and collaborative comment feedback. The study is conducted based on published papers for last two decades. The trends are analyzed to get the overview of latest research contributions towards eliminating programming difficulties among students. The result shows that future direction of automated programming error feedback approaches may combine agent and collaborative feedback approaches towards more interactive, dynamic, end-user oriented and specific goal oriented. Such future direction may help other researchers fill in the gap on new ways of assisting learners to better understand feedback messages provided by automated assessment tool

Orchestration of e-learning services for automatic evaluation of programming exercises

Managing programming exercises require several heterogeneous systems such as evaluation engines, learning objects repositories and exercise resolution environments. The coordination of networks of such disparate systems is rather complex. These tools would be too specific to incorporate in an e-Learning platform. Even if they could be provided as pluggable components, the burden of maintaining them would be prohibitive to institutions with few courses in those domains. This work presents a standard based approach for the coordination of a network of e-Learning systems participating on the automatic evaluation of programming exercises. The proposed approach uses a pivot component to orchestrate the interaction among all the systems using communication standards. This approach was validated through its effective use on classroom and we present some preliminary results