CRACS

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This service develops its activity in the areas of programming languages, parallel and distributed computing, data mining, intelligent systems and software architecture, with emphasis on solving concrete problems in areas of multidisciplinary collaboration, such as Biology, Medicine and Chemistry.

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Browsing CRACS by Author "5088"
  • Item
    Automated Assessment in Computer Science Education: A State-of-the-Art Review
    ( 2022) Álvaro Figueira ; José Paulo Leal ; José Carlos Paiva ; 5088 ; 5125 ; 6251
    Practical programming competencies are critical to the success in computer science (CS) education and goto-market of fresh graduates. Acquiring the required level of skills is a long journey of discovery, trial and error, and optimization seeking through a broad range of programming activities that learners must perform themselves. It is not reasonable to consider that teachers could evaluate all attempts that the average learner should develop multiplied by the number of students enrolled in a course, much less in a timely, deep, and fair fashion. Unsurprisingly, exploring the formal structure of programs to automate the assessment of certain features has long been a hot topic among CS education practitioners. Assessing a program is considerably more complex than asserting its functional correctness, as the proliferation of tools and techniques in the literature over the past decades indicates. Program efficiency, behavior, and readability, among many other features, assessed either statically or dynamically, are now also relevant for automatic evaluation. The outcome of an evaluation evolved from the primordial Boolean values to information about errors and tips on how to advance, possibly taking into account similar solutions. This work surveys the state of the art in the automated assessment of CS assignments, focusing on the supported types of exercises, security measures adopted, testing techniques used, type of feedback produced, and the information they offer the teacher to understand and optimize learning. A new era of automated assessment, capitalizing on static analysis techniques and containerization, has been identified. Furthermore, this review presents several other findings from the conducted review, discusses the current challenges of the field, and proposes some future research directions.
  • Item
    Automated Assessment in Computer Science Education: A State-of-the-Art Review
    ( 2022) Álvaro Figueira ; José Paulo Leal ; José Carlos Paiva ; 5088 ; 5125 ; 6251
    Practical programming competencies are critical to the success in computer science (CS) education and goto-market of fresh graduates. Acquiring the required level of skills is a long journey of discovery, trial and error, and optimization seeking through a broad range of programming activities that learners must perform themselves. It is not reasonable to consider that teachers could evaluate all attempts that the average learner should develop multiplied by the number of students enrolled in a course, much less in a timely, deep, and fair fashion. Unsurprisingly, exploring the formal structure of programs to automate the assessment of certain features has long been a hot topic among CS education practitioners. Assessing a program is considerably more complex than asserting its functional correctness, as the proliferation of tools and techniques in the literature over the past decades indicates. Program efficiency, behavior, and readability, among many other features, assessed either statically or dynamically, are now also relevant for automatic evaluation. The outcome of an evaluation evolved from the primordial Boolean values to information about errors and tips on how to advance, possibly taking into account similar solutions. This work surveys the state of the art in the automated assessment of CS assignments, focusing on the supported types of exercises, security measures adopted, testing techniques used, type of feedback produced, and the information they offer the teacher to understand and optimize learning. A new era of automated assessment, capitalizing on static analysis techniques and containerization, has been identified. Furthermore, this review presents several other findings from the conducted review, discusses the current challenges of the field, and proposes some future research directions.
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    Automated Assessment in Computer Science: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Literature
    ( 2022) José Paulo Leal ; Álvaro Figueira ; 5125 ; 5088
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    Bibliometric Analysis of Automated Assessment in Programming Education: A Deeper Insight into Feedback
    ( 2023) Álvaro Figueira ; José Paulo Leal ; 5088 ; 5125
    Learning to program requires diligent practice and creates room for discovery, trial and error, debugging, and concept mapping. Learners must walk this long road themselves, supported by appropriate and timely feedback. Providing such feedback in programming exercises is not a humanly feasible task. Therefore, the early and steadily growing interest of computer science educators in the automated assessment of programming exercises is not surprising. The automated assessment of programming assignments has been an active area of research for over a century, and interest in it continues to grow as it adapts to new developments in computer science and the resulting changes in educational requirements. It is therefore of paramount importance to understand the work that has been performed, who has performed it, its evolution over time, the relationships between publications, its hot topics, and open problems, among others. This paper presents a bibliometric study of the field, with a particular focus on the issue of automatic feedback generation, using literature data from the Web of Science Core Collection. It includes a descriptive analysis using various bibliometric measures and data visualizations on authors, affiliations, citations, and topics. In addition, we performed a complementary analysis focusing only on the subset of publications on the specific topic of automatic feedback generation. The results are highlighted and discussed.
  • Item
    Bibliometric Analysis of Automated Assessment in Programming Education: A Deeper Insight into Feedback
    ( 2023) Álvaro Figueira ; José Paulo Leal ; 5088 ; 5125
    Learning to program requires diligent practice and creates room for discovery, trial and error, debugging, and concept mapping. Learners must walk this long road themselves, supported by appropriate and timely feedback. Providing such feedback in programming exercises is not a humanly feasible task. Therefore, the early and steadily growing interest of computer science educators in the automated assessment of programming exercises is not surprising. The automated assessment of programming assignments has been an active area of research for over a century, and interest in it continues to grow as it adapts to new developments in computer science and the resulting changes in educational requirements. It is therefore of paramount importance to understand the work that has been performed, who has performed it, its evolution over time, the relationships between publications, its hot topics, and open problems, among others. This paper presents a bibliometric study of the field, with a particular focus on the issue of automatic feedback generation, using literature data from the Web of Science Core Collection. It includes a descriptive analysis using various bibliometric measures and data visualizations on authors, affiliations, citations, and topics. In addition, we performed a complementary analysis focusing only on the subset of publications on the specific topic of automatic feedback generation. The results are highlighted and discussed.
  • Item
    PROGpedia: Collection of source-code submitted to introductory programming assignments
    ( 2023) Álvaro Figueira ; José Paulo Leal ; José Carlos Paiva ; 5088 ; 5125 ; 6251
    Learning how to program is a difficult task. To acquire the re-quired skills, novice programmers must solve a broad range of programming activities, always supported with timely, rich, and accurate feedback. Automated assessment tools play a major role in fulfilling these needs, being a common pres-ence in introductory programming courses. As programming exercises are not easy to produce and those loaded into these tools must adhere to specific format requirements, teachers often opt for reusing them for several years. There-fore, most automated assessment tools, particularly Mooshak, store hundreds of submissions to the same programming ex-ercises, as these need to be kept after automatically pro-cessed for possible subsequent manual revision. Our dataset consists of the submissions to 16 programming exercises in Mooshak proposed in multiple years within the 2003-2020 timespan to undergraduate Computer Science students at the Faculty of Sciences from the University of Porto. In particular, we extract their code property graphs and store them as CSV files. The analysis of this data can enable, for instance, the generation of more concise and personalized feedback based on similar accepted submissions in the past, the identifica-tion of different strategies to solve a problem, the under -standing of a student's thinking process, among many other findings.(c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )
  • Item
    PROGpedia: Collection of source-code submitted to introductory programming assignments
    ( 2023) Álvaro Figueira ; José Paulo Leal ; José Carlos Paiva ; 5088 ; 5125 ; 6251
    Learning how to program is a difficult task. To acquire the re-quired skills, novice programmers must solve a broad range of programming activities, always supported with timely, rich, and accurate feedback. Automated assessment tools play a major role in fulfilling these needs, being a common pres-ence in introductory programming courses. As programming exercises are not easy to produce and those loaded into these tools must adhere to specific format requirements, teachers often opt for reusing them for several years. There-fore, most automated assessment tools, particularly Mooshak, store hundreds of submissions to the same programming ex-ercises, as these need to be kept after automatically pro-cessed for possible subsequent manual revision. Our dataset consists of the submissions to 16 programming exercises in Mooshak proposed in multiple years within the 2003-2020 timespan to undergraduate Computer Science students at the Faculty of Sciences from the University of Porto. In particular, we extract their code property graphs and store them as CSV files. The analysis of this data can enable, for instance, the generation of more concise and personalized feedback based on similar accepted submissions in the past, the identifica-tion of different strategies to solve a problem, the under -standing of a student's thinking process, among many other findings.(c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )