Mooshak's Diet Update: Introducing YAPExIL Format to Mooshak (Short Paper)

Abstract

Practice is pivotal in learning programming. As many other automated assessment tools for programming assignments, Mooshak has been adopted by numerous educational practitioners to support them in delivering timely and accurate feedback to students during exercise solving. These tools specialize in the delivery and assessment of blank-sheet coding questions. However, the different phases of a student's learning path may demand distinct types of exercises (e.g., bug fix and block sorting) to foster new competencies such as debugging programs and understanding unknown source code or, otherwise, to break the routine and keep engagement. Recently, a format for describing programming exercises - YAPExIL -, supporting different types of activities, has been introduced. Unfortunately, no automated assessment tool yet supports this novel format. This paper describes a JavaScript library to transform YAPExIL packages into Mooshak problem packages (i.e., MEF format), keeping support for all exercise types. Moreover, its integration in an exercise authoring tool is described.