Generator of text-based assignments for programming courses
Mojca Jager · PeFprints (University of Ljubljana) · 2013
Verifying and assessing of knowledge represent important part of education. A teacher can verify knowledge on different ways, like classically oral and written, which are in majority still dominant types, and alternatively, which is based on student's current activities. During assembling the questions for written verification, many teachers nowadays help themselves using different test generators like Hot Potatoes, Moodle, Test Pilot, and others, they are all available on internet. At the Pedagogical faculty of the University of Ljubljana at the study courses Programing I and Programing II (in continuation: Programing) a teacher do not use any test generator during assembling questions for written verification. This means that for assembling new written questions, a teacher has to use a lot of imagination and has to take time needed. A requirement to reduce a teacher's working load during further assembling of exam questions for written verification lead us to the topic for this diploma thesis which is development of a generator of text assignments. The generator is specific for generating text assignments for programing languages Pascal, C, and JavaScript. To acquire the information about what should be the features of our generator, we first performed a few interviews with a few university teachers, and made the analysis of exam questions and assignments which appeared during written examinations in the past years. We originated from the features being the main characteristics of some generators readily available on internet. We shortly described these characteristics in the thesis and maximally considered them during development of our generator. To develop the generator, we used web server Apache, server scripting language PHP, and MYSQL system to maintain databases. At the end of diploma thesis, we performed evaluation of the developed generator, described the problems we were faced with during its development, and listed suggestions for its upgrading.