Programming Exercises Interoperability: The Case of a Non-Picky Consumer

Abstract

Problem-solving is considered one of the most important skills to retain in the coming decades for building a modern and proactive society. In this realm, computer programming learning is vital to enrich those skills. Practicing in this area boils down to solve programming exercises. In order to foster this practice, it is necessary to provide students with the best of the breed automated tools and a good set of exercises in a fair quantity covering the curricula of a typical programming course. Despite the increasing appearance of automated tools such as program evaluators, gamification engines and sophisticated web environments, access to exercises remains problematic. In fact, although the existence of several code repositories (most for feed computer programming contests), the majority of them store the exercises in proprietary formats and without any access facilities hindering their use. This leaves no other option to teachers but to manually create programming exercises which is time-consuming and error prone, or simply, reuse the same exercises, from previous years, which is considered as a detrimental and limiting approach to enhance multi-faceted and creative programmers. The article surveys the current interoperability efforts on programming exercises, more precisely, in terms of serialization formats and communication protocols. This study will sustain the selection of an API to feed a code playground called LearnJS with random programming exercises.