Using terminal histories to monitor student progress on hands-on exercises

Abstract

Hands-on exercises are often used to improve student engagement and knowledge retention in systems, networking and cybersecurity classes. Even when students comprehend the concepts, they may lack the skills to complete an exercise. Teachers need eective tools to identify these problems during an assignment and oer targeted and timely help. This paper explores the use of terminal histories with milestone detection to enable rapid, automated and on-going assessment of studentwork while performing hands-on exercises.We describe our system, called ACSLE, which monitors terminal input and output for each student, compares it with desired milestones, and produces both summaries and detailed statistics of student progress. We analyze data from undergraduates at two colleges, as they performed several well-structured cybersecurity assignments on a network testbed. We show how ACSLE's output can help teachers identify students that struggle, understand why they struggle andoer timely help. ACSLE can also help teachers identify challenging tasks and plan class-wide interventions.