On Automated Checking of Java Applets

2009

This paper describes the use of clickers in a Java programming course. However, instead of using ordinary hardware clickers, we use software clickers, implemented in Java, that allow for much richer problem types than the traditional multiple-choice question. The problem types we introduce in this paper give students a much higher degree of freedom in solving a problem, and thus more opportunities for making mistakes. We look at mistakes as learning opportunities, and we introduce a pedagogical approach that allows students to learn from mistakes of their peers. We finish with a case study and evaluation of our implementation of these ideas in an undergraduate Java programming course.

Proceedings of the 27th ACM Conference on on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education Vol. 1, 2022

We present Jask, a system capable of generating questions about a learner's code written in Java. Given Java code as input, Jask provides a set of meaningful questions formulated in terms of the actual code (using its constructs and identifiers) and the corresponding correct answers. We integrated Jask in a web-based system where students submit their code (e.g., from lab exercises), answer questions about it, and obtain immediate formative feedback with the correct answers. An initial study involving 123 distinct introductory programming students providing 2274 answers revealed that questions pertaining to program dynamics tend to register low scores, possibly evidencing fragile comprehension of programming constructs. Participants were surveyed, revealing a positive view towards the usefulness of Jask, especially with respect to consolidating terminology.

Journal of Intelligent Learning Systems and Applications, 2012

This paper presents a graph-based grading system for Java introductory programming courses, eGrader. This system grades submission both dynamically and statically to ensure a complete and through grading job. While dynamic analysis is based on JUnit framework, the static analysis is based on the graph representation of the program and its quality which is measured by software metrics. The graph representation is based on the Control Dependence Graphs (CDG) and Method Call Dependencies (MCD). eGrader outperforms existing systems in two ways: the ability of grading submission with semantic-errors, effectively, and generating reports for students, as a feedback on their performance, and instructors on the overall performance of the class. eGrader is well received by instructors not only for saving time and effort but also for its high success rate that is measured by four performance indicators which are sensitivity (97.37%), specificity (98.1%), precision (98.04%) and accuracy (97.07%).

Proceedings of the Sixth Program Visualization Workshop, 2011

FRONTIERS IN EDUCATION CONFERENCE, 2000

Games have been a form of entertainment for centuries and used to focus and motivated which is a great feature that can be utilize games as the basis for creating game-based educational applications. Games are part fun and part leisure, trying to educate using games is very interesting, but care must be taken in designing the game interfaces as they should be simple, attractive, usable, and at the same time portray the concept of learning. Many students have found Computer Science as a very challenging subject and some of the most challenging for some new CS1 students is their first programming language. We lose many students to other majors at the level of CS1 and can weed out potential great future computer scientists. In our computing department, Java is the first programming language and many students have problems with it because they do not understand the concepts of classes, objects, encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism. It has been found that games motivate students and focuses them for long period of time. With long periods of time being required to have basic functional understanding of programming language, games can play an important role for intrinsic motivation. We propose a Java game called " JavaZOO " to demonstrate the concepts of programming by mapping the animal kingdom to the object-oriented design principles.

Individualized feedback is an important factor in fostering effective learning. However, it is often not seen in schools because providing it places a significant additional workload on teachers. One way to solve this problem is to employ critiquing tools, which offer students individualized coaching and just-in-time learning opportunities. This paper describes the Java Critiquer, a critiquing system to teach students how to write clean, maintainable and efficient code. The system uses a framework that can be customized to support educational critiquing in other domains. Preliminary results from a pilot test show that the Java Critiquer is capable of providing useful feedback to students as well as helpful support for teachers.

Drill and practice exercises enable students to master skills needed for more sophisticated programming. A barrier to providing such activities is the effort required to set up the programming environment. Testing is an important component to writing good software, but it is difficult to motivate students to write tests. In this paper we describe and evaluate CodeWrite, a web-based tool that provides drill and practice support for Java programming, and for which testing plays a central role in its use. We describe how we have used CodeWrite in a CS1 course, and demonstrate its effectiveness in providing good coverage of the language features presented in the course.

Computer Applications in Engineering Education, 2020

Continuous assessment is essential in education. It should be an integral part of education that provides immediate feedback to students. Unfortunately, the assessment of programming source code is still a hand-operated and errorprone task, and can take weeks before the student gets feedback. This study presents a semiautomatic code assessment method able to automatically apply black-box assessment (which relies on the comparison of input-output pairs) and white-box assessment (which relies on checking different source code properties). The method proposed is a general-purpose assessment system that was originally designated to be used in engineering education, but that can be used in other educational contexts to assist the assessment of any Java programming assignments or exams. The main advantage of this system is that the assessment made is quicker, exhaustive, and objective; and it does not produce false positives. After the application of this method over two years in several

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, 2013

We present a new method for automatically providing feedback for introductory programming problems. In order to use this method, we need a reference implementation of the assignment, and an error model consisting of potential corrections to errors that students might make. Using this information, the system automatically derives minimal corrections to student's incorrect solutions, providing them with a measure of exactly how incorrect a given solution was, as well as feedback about what they did wrong. We introduce a simple language for describing error models in terms of correction rules, and formally define a rule-directed translation strategy that reduces the problem of finding minimal corrections in an incorrect program to the problem of synthesizing a correct program from a sketch. We have evaluated our system on thousands of real student attempts obtained from the Introduction to Programming course at MIT (6.00) and MITx (6.00x). Our results show that relatively simple er...