COCLAC - Feedback Generation for Combined UML Class and Activity Diagram Modeling Tasks.
Philip-Daniel Beck, Thomas Mahlmeister, Marianus Ifland, Frank Puppe · Brazilian Journal of Psychiatry · 2015
We introduce a newly developed visual programming and UML modeling tool for educa- tional use. It's implemented to provide students with informative feedback during exercises as well as to assess the submissions of students automatically. Tasks combine class and activity modeling aspects as well as some simple programming requirements. The system is web-based and named COCLAC. Visual programming is done through an included UML editor. Created diagrams are syn- tactically checked and automatically converted into Java code using several conventions. Thereafter, code is executable on a server and semantic correctness can be checked through automatic tests. urzburg recently. The main motivation for its development was the reduction of manual supervision and correction efforts during UML related exer- cises of the Software Engineering course which is attended by many students from a lot of different disciplines. This is reached by giving informative feedback during the student's editing process and having automatic assessment of a student's submission. Additionally, the tool is meant to increase the intrinsic motivation of students during doing their ex- ercises by gamificating the task to some extend. Previously developed tools (especially WARP (If14)) at the University of W¨ urzburg already do this for UML activity-diagram based visual programming tasks. However, these tasks only provide modeling tasks for behavior without structure modeling. Nevertheless, success with these tools has inspired the development of the novel tool. Thereby, visual programming is done through class and activity diagram modeling offering new complexity of tasks for students. To do this a web-based UML editor is supplied. Diagrams are syntactically checked and automatically converted into Java code using different conventions. After that the code is executed on a server. Therefore automatic tests can be applied to check semantics of the program. Here we want to share our experiences with the tool and discuss emerged problems. The paper is structured as follows: The next section gives an overview of related tools. The third part gives a technical overview of the tool as well as a description of the general