Automatic Unit Testing-Based Assessments for Online C++ Programming Classroom

Abstract

Usually, in programming courses, students can have good programming skills, only through intensive coding practices. This makes programming assignments to be the most important part of computer programming coursework. However, creating programming assignments with the traditional existing tools is not suitable for online learning classrooms, it cannot allow students to automatically tested and scored their assignment tasks. As the result, teachers must have an extensive workload for assessing the programming skill of their students. In this paper, we develop an online C++ web integrated development environment (Web-IDE), where teachers can prepare a set of unit testing-based programming task templates, in which the unique task descriptions and unit tests are specifically generated and assigned for each student, dynamically. The proposed system is implemented in the cloud so that it can be accessed via web browsers on both PC and mobile devices. This allows students to learn to write code, compile, run, test, and grade their programming assignments without installing additional software. We also confirm the effectiveness of the proposed system through our preliminary experiments with a real computer programming classroom.