Enhancing DrRacket with Dodona for Learning Scheme

Abstract

Learning how to program in a typical setting is challenging because feedback can often not be given immediately. Tracking the work of a student is also challenging for teachers, as the work of a student is not readily accessible. Therefore, digital learning environments have been considered to facilitate the learning process. We aim to facilitate the learning process of beginner students learning Scheme. To this end, we have developed a plugin for the DrRacket IDE (used for Scheme), that communicates with Dodona, a web service geared towards helping students learn how to code. Our plugin uses the information provided by this platform to give students immediate feedback on their code inside the DrRacket IDE. To enable the above, we extended the Dodona platform to support Scheme. As part of our extensions, we introduced several dynamic and static analyses to the Dodona platform, which we use to verify additional properties of the code submitted by students.