Many tools have been developed to assist programmers develop high-quality code. However, installing, updating, configuring, learning, and running these tools can be unnecessary burden to students. Moreover, instructors do not have detailed knowledge about students’ learning experience before programming assignments are submitted. This paper presents an online system that can automatically analyze students’ programs and provides insightful information about their code. This system records every syntax and run-time error so that an instructor can obtain real-time view of students’ activities and progress. Hence, the instructor can identify common misconception before an assignment is due. This system is evaluated in an A-B test of a sophomore C programming class of 42 students, and preliminary results suggest that this system has positive effect in helping students learn.
Tian Qiu is a senior undergraduate in Computer Engineering and Mathematics-Computer Science.
Mengshi Feng is a senior student at Purdue University. He is one of the team member in ACCESS project supervised by Yung-Hsiang Lu.
Sitian Lu is a junior studying Computer Engineering in Purdue University. He has been working on the online programming system (ACCESS) since later 2015. Sitian Lu has been studying in Purdue University for 3 years. He is also the vice president of Purdue Billiards Club since 2015.
Carla B. Zoltowski is an assistant professor of engineering practice in the Schools of Electrical and Computer Engineering and (by courtesy) Engineering Education at Purdue University. She holds a B.S.E.E., M.S.E.E., and Ph.D. in Engineering Education, all from Purdue. Prior to this she was Co-Director of the EPICS Program at Purdue where she was responsible for developing curriculum and assessment tools and overseeing the research efforts within EPICS. Her academic and research interests include the professional formation of engineers, diversity and inclusion in engineering, human-centered design, engineering ethics, leadership, service-learning, and accessibility and assistive-technology.
Yung-Hsiang Lu is an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and (by courtesy) the Department of Computer Science of Purdue University. He is an ACM distinguished scientist and ACM distinguished speaker. He is a member in the organizing committee of the IEEE Rebooting Computing Initiative. He is the lead organizer of the first Low-Power Image Recognition Challenge in 2015, the chair (2014-2016) of the Multimedia Communication Systems Interest Group in IEEE Multimedia Communications Technical Committee. He obtained the Ph.D. from the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University.
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