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.

We describe an automated assessment system called Test My Code (TMC) that is designed to support instructors' and students' work in programming courses. From the students' point of view, TMC is a transparent assessment service that is integrated to an industry-standard programming environment. TMC is used to provide scaffolding of students' learning during the working process, and to retrieve and update exercises as the students work on them, without causing additional overhead to the learning process. From the instructors' perspective, TMC makes collaborative crafting of exercises easier, supports building exercises with smaller goals that combine into bigger programs, gathers snapshots from students' programming process, collects feedback from students, and has the capability to export course submission data into external systems. TMC has been used in massive open online courses on programming as well as in courses on web-development with hundreds of students.

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This paper describes how an educational method called Extreme Apprenticeship has been used in teaching mathematics to undergraduates. The aim has been to facilitate the transition from secondary to tertiary education and to teach students the kind of skills they need in further studies and professional life. We report how the Extreme Apprenticeship method has been implemented in the course Linear algebra and matrices I at the University of Helsinki. This first year mathematics course has approximately 400 students each year. We compare the method with the traditional lecture-based approach that was in use before introducing the Extreme Apprenticeship method. We focus on how these two methods engage students. The results show that the Extreme Apprenticeship method managed to engage the students better than traditional teaching, as more students completed their coursework than before. Even though the new teaching method demanded a lot of personal effort from the students, they did not think that the workload was too big, and were pleased with the course.