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As programming is the basis of many CS courses, meaningful activities in supporting students on their journey towards being better programmers is a matter of utmost importance.Programming is not only about learning simple syntax constructs and their applications, but about honing practical problem-solving skills in meaningful contexts. In this article, we describe our current work on an automated assessment system called Test My Code (TMC), which is one of the feedback and support mechanisms that we use in our programming courses. TMC is an assessment service that (1) enables building of scaffolding into programming exercises;(2) retrieves and updates tasks into the students' programming environment as students work on them, and (3) causes no additional overhead to students' programming process. Instructors benefit from TMC as it can be used to perform code reviews, and collect and send feedback even on fully on-line courses.

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MOOCs (massive open online courses) became a hugely popular topic in both academic and non-academic discussions in 2012. Many of the offered MOOCs are somewhat "watereddown versions" of the actual courses given by the MOOC professors at their home universities. At the University of Helsinki, Department of Computer Science, our MOOC on introductory programming is exactly the same course as our first programming course on campus. Our MOOC uses the Extreme Apprenticeship (XA) model for programming education, thus ensuring that students are proceeding stepby-step in the desired direction. As an additional twist, we have used our MOOC as an entrance exam to studies in University of Helsinki. In this paper, we compare the student achievement after one year of studies between two cohorts: the MOOC intake (n=38) and the intake that started their studies during the fall (n=68). The results indicate that student achievement is at least as good on the MOOC intake when compared to the normal intake. An additional benefit is that the students admitted via MOOC are less likely to drop out from their studies during their first year.