An Eclipse-based course project snapshot and submission system

ABSTRACT

Much research has been done on techniques to teach students how to program. However, it is usually difficult to quantify exactly how students work. Instructors typically only see students' work when they submit their projects or come to office hours. Another common problem in introductory programming courses is that student code is only subjected to rigorous testing once it has been submitted. Both of these problems can be viewed as a lack of feedback between students and instructors.We have built an Eclipse plugin to address this lack of feedback. The plugin has two main functions. First, it captures, to a central CVS repository, the complete state of a student's project every time he or she saves, adds, or removes a file. This produces a fine-grained history of the evolution of each student's project. Second, the plugin allows the student to submit his or her project to a central server. The submit server automatically compiles and performs limited testing of the student's submission, providing feedback on how close the project is to fulfilling the project requirements.Our goal is to provide instructors and researchers with far more detailed information about how students learn and work, and provide feedback to students that will help them focus on achieving the goals of the projects we assign.

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