WebToTeach: an interactive focused programming exercise system

Arnow, David; Barshay, Oleg

doi:10.1109/fie.1999.839303

Cited by 46 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…The first lesson option for all studies was the What's Wrong With My Code teaching instrument. The alternate lesson in the Spring study had the student complete several exercises with the Codelab [2] instructional programming environment. The Fall study utilized a home grown automated assessment system to replace Codelab, and the participants also had to read a brief article about programming.…”

Section: Study Implementationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Systems such as Codelab [2] have established online presence as tutoring software for computer science education. Additionally, researchers [6] [17] have shown that increasing the interaction level of the tools utilized within computer science education can improve students' scores.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One of the goals of automated assessment is to replace both grading and grading feedback with automated testing suites, thus reducing the workload of instructors with growing class sizes. As an example, the Codelab [2] environment allows both automated assessment through grading of a multitude of exercises as well as feedback on an errant solution in an attempt to guide the student to a correct submission. However, automated assessment utilities can have drawbacks based on how general or how specific the tool implementation and use is.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Over several years, various forms of automated assessment [10][16] [17] tools have also been created to either grade homework or tutor a student on a specific topic or both. In recent years a few of note include WebCAT [7] , Marmoset [15] , and Codelab [2] . One of the goals of automated assessment is to replace both grading and grading feedback with automated testing suites, thus reducing the workload of instructors with growing class sizes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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What's Wrong With My Code (WWWMC)

Koehler¹

2016 ASEE Annual Conference &Amp; Exposition Proceedings

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Studentinstructor interaction and passage of knowledge is often optimal in a oneonone setting. Knowledge, including information about topicspecific misconceptions, is imparted through individualized interactions between the student and the instructor. Unfortunately, these interactions can be time consuming. Automated assessment and directed educational tools attempt to address the time concerns by presenting the student with immediate feedback, but can often be lacking in other ways.Our paper presents a teaching instrument, What's Wrong With My Code, that allows us to capture these oneonone interactions. We provide our design methods used to create the What's Wrong With My Code problem sets and analyze the results of studies which utilized the problem sets within a teaching environment.

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Section: Study Implementationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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What's Wrong With My Code (WWWMC)

Koehler¹

2016 ASEE Annual Conference &Amp; Exposition Proceedings

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“…Early automated assessment of programming assignments provided immediate feedback for students [13] [14]. Such feedback (including hints [7]) has been shown to be beneficial to the learning process.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Analysis of Incorporating Small Coding Exercises as Homework in Introductory Programming Courses

Edgcomb

Vahid

Lysecky³

et al.

2017 ASEE Annual Conference &Amp; Exposition Proceedings

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Alex Edgcomb finished his PhD in computer science at UC Riverside in 2014. Alex works with zyBooks.com, a startup that develops interactive, web-native textbooks in STEM. Alex also works as a research specialist at UC Riverside, studying the efficacy of web-native content for STEM education. His research interests include embedded systems, runtime optimization, non-intrusive system observation methods, data-adaptable systems, and embedded system security. He has recently coauthored multiple textbooks, published by zyBooks, that utilize a web-native, interactive, and animated approach, which has shown notable increases in student learning and course grades. Prof ABSTRACTSmall auto-graded coding exercises with immediate feedback are widely recognized as helping students in introductory programming courses. We analyzed usage of a particular coding exercise tool, at 11 courses at different universities. Instructors awarded differing amounts of course points (including zero) for the exercises. We investigated how awarding points affected student completion rates of the exercises. We found that without awarding points, completion rates were about 25%. Awarding even a small amount of points, such as 2 course points out of 100, resulted in 62% completion, with little increase in completion rates for more course points (such as 5, 10, or even 25). Comparing to participation activity completion rates of 85%, one might conclude that the 62% is short of 100% in part due to some students simply not doing homework (15%), and the remaining 23% due to the greater difficulty of the exercises. We analyzed time spent, and found that students spent about 3.3 minutes per exercise, matching the expected 2-4 minutes by the exercise authors. We analyzed number of tries per exercise, and found students submitted 3.5 tries on average per exercise. For some harder exercises, the averages were higher at 5-10 tries, suggesting the students are indeed putting forth good effort. We found very high numbers of tries by some students on a single exercise, sometimes 30, 50, or even 100, suggesting more work is needed to assist such students to better learn the concepts rather than repeatedly submitting tries, and to reduce frustration and increase learning efficiency.

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Learning Programming by Solving Problems

Kumar

2003

IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology

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We have been developing tutors to help students learn programmjng concepts by solving problems. In this paper, we will discuss the use of problem-solving in Computer Science, the effectiveness of using problem-solving tutors to learn programming concepts, and the pedagogical relationship between solving problems and learning to write programs. We will also present the design and results from the evaluation of one of our tutors. 1. PROBLEM-SOLVING AND COMPUTER SCIENCE Problem-based learning improves long-term retention [12], and is better than traditional instruction for improving the ability of students to solve reallife problems. In Computer Science, various researchers have advocated the use of self-paced exercises [24], practice to build problem-solving skills [35], and the use of frequent, graded assignments in a course [9]. It is reported that "students universally want to see more examples both in class and in their textbooks" [38]. Solving problems facilitates active learning, whose place in Computer Science education has been established [26]. Textbooks are generally inadequate as sources of problems because of their limited, non-interactive nature. Even in disciplines such as Physics and Mathematics, where textbooks generally tend to include many more practice The original version of this chapter was revised: The copyright line was incorrect. This has been corrected. The Erratum to this chapter is available at

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WebToTeach: an interactive focused programming exercise system

Cited by 46 publications

References 17 publications

What's Wrong With My Code (WWWMC)

What's Wrong With My Code (WWWMC)

An Analysis of Incorporating Small Coding Exercises as Homework in Introductory Programming Courses

Learning Programming by Solving Problems

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