System for Automated Assistance in Correction of Programming Exercises

Abstract

In university programming classes often hundreds of students participate having to solve each hundreds of programming assignments a situation which puts instructors to the difficult task of validating hundreds of programming assignments. We present a framework that can help instructors and students in organization and validation of program code. Our “System for Automated Assistance in Correction of Programming Exercises“ (short: SAC) is a web-platform for test-driven development and automated validation. The web-platform is based on Java Server Pages technology with tomcat as servlet container, and allows teachers to specify and define program exercises and students to upload their solutions. Students can get immediate feedback on the validity of their code and both instructors and students can see statistics about each programming assignment. We explain our platform and propose how the automatic validation can be extended.