CRACS - Indexed Articles in Journals

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    Defining programming problems as learning objects
    ( 2009) Ricardo Queirós ; José Paulo Leal ; 5695 ; 5125
    Standards for learning objects focus primarily on content presentation. They were already extended to support automatic evaluation but it is limited to exercises with a predefined set of answers. The existing standards lack the metadata required by specialized evaluators to handle types of exercises with an indefinite set of solutions. To address this issue existing learning object standards were extended to the particular requirements of a specialized domain. A definition of programming problems as learning objects, compatible both with Learning Management Systems and with systems performing automatic evaluation of programs, is presented in this paper. The proposed definition includes metadata that cannot be conveniently represented using existing standards, such as: the type of automatic evaluation; the requirements of the evaluation engine; and the roles of different assets - tests cases, program solutions, etc. The EduJudge project and its main services are also presented as a case study on the use of the proposed definition of programming problems as learning objects.
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    A CLP-based tool for computer aided generation and solving of maths exercises
    ( 2003) José Paulo Leal ; 5125
    We propose an interesting application of Constraint Logic Programming to automatic generation and explanation of mathematics exercises. A particular topic in mathematics is considered to investigate and illustrate the advantages of using the CLP paradigm. The goal is to develop software components that make the formulation and explanation of exercise's easier. We describe exercises by grammars which enables us to get specialized forms almost for free, by imposing further conditions through constraints. To define the grammars we concentrate on the solving procedures that are taught instead of trying to abstract an exercise template from a sample of similar exercises. Prototype programs indicate that Constraint Logic Programming frameworks may be adequate to implement such a tool. These languages have the right expressiveness to encode control on the system in an elegant and declarative way.
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    Mooshak: a Web-based multi-site programming contest system
    ( 2003) Fernando Silva ; José Paulo Leal ; 5124 ; 5125
    This paper presents a new Web-based system, Mooshak, to handle programming contests. The system acts as a full contest manager as well as an automatic judge for programming contests. Mooshak innovates in a number of aspects: it has a scalable architecture that can be used from small single server contests to complex multi-site contests with simultaneous public online contests and redundancy; it has a robust data management system favoring simple procedures for storing, replicating, backing up data and failure recovery using persistent objects; it has automatic judging capabilities to assist human judges in the evaluation of programs; it has built-in safety measures to prevent users from interfering with the normal progress of contests. Mooshak is an open system implemented on the Linux operating system using the Apache HTTP server and the TcI scripting language. This paper starts by describing the main features of the system and its architecture with reference to the automated judging, data management based on the replication of persistent objects over a network. Finally, we describe our experience using this system for managing two official programming contests. Copyright (C) 2003 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.
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    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.