How to Assess Programming Skills: Review and Analysis
Maren Schnieder, S.R. Williams · 2022
The interest in educational apps that teach and also assess programming skills is on the increase. They have the potential to enhance the learning environment for students through regular feedback and gamification. This paper provides an overview of the assessment tools used in apps that teach programming in Python. These have been reviewed and categorised in this paper. The apps have also been evaluated based on features such as providing a Python IDE, costs, advertisements, downloads, and the country of the developer. The most common type of question includes Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs), missing code (i.e. fill in blanks in code snippets), selecting the output of the code and identifying errors in the code. Recommendations for future app and assessment development have been made based on these findings. The goal of this paper is to illustrate to lecturers and teachers that it is possible to create interactive learning environments and teach programming by using only simplistic or existing resources.