Background Learning to code is increasingly embedded in secondary and higher education curricula, where solving programming exercises plays an important role in the learning process and in formative and summative assessment. Unfortunately, students admit that copying code from each other is a common practice and teachers indicate they rarely use plagiarism detection tools. Objectives We want to lower the barrier for teachers to detect plagiarism by introducing a new source code plagiarism detection tool (Dolos) that is powered by state‐of‐the art similarity detection algorithms, offers interactive visualizations, and uses generic parser models to support a broad range of programming languages. Methods Dolos is compared with state‐of‐the‐art plagiarism detection tools in a benchmark based on a standardized dataset. We describe our experience with integrating Dolos in a programming course with a strong focus on online learning and the impact of transitioning to remote assessment during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Results and Conclusions Dolos outperforms other plagiarism detection tools in detecting potential cases of plagiarism and is a valuable tool for preventing and detecting plagiarism in online learning environments. It is available under the permissive MIT open‐source license at https://dolos.ugent.be. Implications Dolos lowers barriers for teachers to discover, prove and prevent plagiarism in programming courses. This helps to enable a shift towards open and online learning and assessment environments, and opens up interesting avenues for more effective learning and better assessment.

The Rocker Project provides widely used Docker images for R across different application scenarios. This article surveys downstream projects that build upon the Rocker Project images and presents the current state of R packages for managing Docker images and controlling containers. These use cases cover diverse topics such as package development, reproducible research, collaborative work, cloud-based data processing, and production deployment of services. The variety of applications demonstrates the power of the Rocker Project specifically and containerisation in general. Across the diverse ways to use containers, we identified common themes: reproducible environments, scalability and efficiency, and portability across clouds. We conclude that the current growth and diversification of use cases is likely to continue its positive impact, but see the need for consolidating the Rockerverse ecosystem of packages, developing common practices for applications, and exploring alternative containerisation software.

We present a privacy-friendly early-detection framework to identify students at risk of failing in introductory programming courses at university. The framework was validated for two different courses with annual editions taken by higher education students ( N = 2 080) and was found to be highly accurate and robust against variation in course structures, teaching and learning styles, programming exercises and classification algorithms. By using interpretable machine learning techniques, the framework also provides insight into what aspects of practising programming skills promote or inhibit learning or have no or minor effect on the learning process. Findings showed that the framework was capable of predicting students’ future success already early on in the semester.

Dodona () is an intelligent tutoring system for computer programming. It provides real-time data and feedback to help students learn better and teachers teach better.Dodona is free to use and has more than 61 thousand registered users across many educational and research institutes, including 20 thousand new users in the last year. The source code of Dodona is available on GitHub under the permissive MIT open-source license.This paper presents Dodona and its design and look-and-feel. We highlight some of the features built into Dodona that make it possible to shorten feedback loops, and discuss an example of how these features can be used in practice. We also highlight some of the research opportunities that Dodona has opened up and present some future developments. Code metadataCurrent code version 2023.08 Permanent link to code/repository used for this code version https://github.com/ElsevierSoftwareX/SOFTX-D-23-00106 Code Ocean compute capsule n/a Legal Code License MIT Code versioning system used git Software code languages, tools, and services used Ruby 3.1 (Ruby-on-Rails 7.0), JavaScript, TypeScript Compilation requirements, operating environments & dependencies Ruby 3.1, yarn 1.22, Unix-like (e.g. Ubuntu 22.04), Memcached 1.6.14, MySQL 8 If available Link to developer documentation/manual https://docs.dodona.be Support email for questions