ABSTRACT
Much research has been done on techniques to teach students how to program. However, it is usually difficult to quantify exactly how students work. Instructors typically only see students' work when they submit their projects or come to office hours. Another common problem in introductory programming courses is that student code is only subjected to rigorous testing once it has been submitted. Both of these problems can be viewed as a lack of feedback between students and instructors.We have built an Eclipse plugin to address this lack of feedback. The plugin has two main functions. First, it captures, to a central CVS repository, the complete state of a student's project every time he or she saves, adds, or removes a file. This produces a fine-grained history of the evolution of each student's project. Second, the plugin allows the student to submit his or her project to a central server. The submit server automatically compiles and performs limited testing of the student's submission, providing feedback on how close the project is to fulfilling the project requirements.Our goal is to provide instructors and researchers with far more detailed information about how students learn and work, and provide feedback to students that will help them focus on achieving the goals of the projects we assign.
- S. K. Adrianoff, D. B. Levine, S. D. Gewand, and G. A. Heissenberger. A testing-based framework for programming contests. In Proceedings of the Eclipse Technology Exchange Workshop, Anaheim, CA, USA, October 2003. Google ScholarDigital Library
- CVS. http://www.cvshome.org, 2004.Google Scholar
- D. Hovemeyer and W. Pugh. Finding bugs is easy. SIGPLAN Notices, December 2004. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Kölling, B. Quig, A. Patterson, and J. Rosenberg. The BlueJ system and its pedagogy. Journal of Computer Science Education, 13(4), December 2003.Google Scholar
- Y. Liu, E. Stroulia, K. Wong, and D. German. Using CVS historical information to understand how students develop software. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories, Edinburgh, Scotland, May 2004.Google Scholar
- C. Reis and R. Cartwright. A friendly face for eclipse. In Proceedings of the 2003 OOPSLA workshop on eclipse technology eXchange, pages 25--29. ACM Press, 2003. Google ScholarDigital Library
- D. Saff and M. D. Ernst. An experimental evaluation of continuous testing during development. In ISSTA 2004, Proceedings of the 2004 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, pages 76--85, Boston, MA, USA, July 12--14, 2004. Google ScholarDigital Library
- K. Wong, W. Blanchet, Y. Liu, C. Schofield, E. Stroulia, and Z. Xing. JRefleX: Towards supporting small student software teams. In Proceedings of the Eclipse Technology Exchange Workshop, Anaheim, CA, USA, October 2003. Google ScholarDigital Library
- An Eclipse-based course project snapshot and submission system
Comments