Automated programming assignment grading tools have become integral to CS courses at introductory as well as advanced levels. However a lot of these tools have their own custom approaches to setting up assignments and describing how solutions should be tested, requiring instructors to make a significant learning investment to begin using a new tool. In addition, differences between tools mean that initial investment must be repeated when switching tools or adding a new one. Worse still, tool-specific strategies further reduce the ability of educators to share and reuse their assignments. As a solution to this problem, we describe our experiences working with PEML, the Programming Exercise Markup Language, which provides an easy to use, instructor friendly approach for writing programming assignments. Unlike tool-oriented data interchange formats, PEML is designed to provide a human friendly authoring format that has been developed to be intuitive, expressive and not be a technological or notational barrier to instructors. We describe the design of PEML and also discuss its implementation as a programming library, a web application, and a microservice that provides full parsing and rendering capabilities for easy integration into any tools or scripting libraries. We also describe the integration of PEML into two automated testing and grading tools used at Virginia Tech by the CS department: Code Workout and Web-CAT. We then describe our experiences using PEML to describe a full range of programming assignments, laboratory exercises, and small coding questions of varying complexity in demonstrating the practicality of the notation. We evaluate the feasibility of PEML using this encoding exercise as well as the effect of its integration into the aforementioned automated grading tools. We finally present a framework for integrating PEML into existing grading tools and then draw our conclusions as well as list down avenues PEML can be expanded into in the future. / Master of Science / Automated grading tools have become ubiquitous to CS courses focused on programming concepts at both the undergraduate as well as graduate level. These tools allow instructors to provide near instant feedback to students as well as spend more time focusing on the curriculum rather than grading. However, these tools use a variety programming assignment representation formats and without a standardized representation, instructors and educators may struggle to share and reuse assignments across different tools and platforms. To address this need, we have developed the Programming Exercise Markup Language (PEML), a standardized format for representing programming exercises, designed to be human-friendly as well as easy to learn and use. PEML includes information about the problem statement, input and output formats, constraints, and sample test cases, and can be used for a wide range of exercise types and programming languages. As part of this master's thesis project, we encoded 50 assignments of varying size and difficulty into PEML as well as integrated support for PEML into Web-CAT and Code Workout, two commonly used automated grading tools used at Virginia Tech. Building upon our experience performing this task, we also designed a framework that can be utilized when integrating PEML into other automated grading tools. By providing a standardized way of representing programming assignments, PEML can help to streamline programming education and make it easier for instructors and educators to create and share assignments across different tools and platforms.

Microworlds are visual, 2D grid-based worlds with programmable actors that help ease students into programming. Microworlds have been used as a pedagogical tool for teaching students to program in an object-oriented paradigm for several years now. With the popularity of Android smart phones, creating a pedagogical microworld for Android can help students learn not just Java, OO and event-driven concepts, but also learn to use the Android framework to create concrete, real-world applications. This thesis presents Sofia.Micro, an Android-based pedagogical microworld framework that not only allows Greenfoot-style microworld programs to run on Android, but also adds additional functionalities to microworlds that have not been previously explored, such as built-in shape and physics support, event-driven programming in a microworld context, and allowing for both Greenfoot-style actors and Karel-style actors in the same world. / Master of Science

Examiners of programming assignments in higher education and people in the software industry both need to test and review code. However, the assessing techniques used are often quite different. The IT industry often uses agile work methods like continuous integration and automated tests, while examiners either do manual assessments or rely on code grading tools. The students will most likely become developers and work using agile processes. Therefore, there are possible benefits of universities trying to imitate the work processes of the software industry. The purpose of this study was to develop a workflow for programming assignments inspired by continuous integration, Scrum, and GitLab flow. The workflow was developed based on the requirements of Linnaeus University and tested on one of their programming assignments. It showed that a simplified agile work process is suitable for programming assignments since the demonstration fulfilled all of the predefined requirements. However, examiners might miss some of the workflow’s benefits if the programming assignment can not be tested automatically since it will require more manual work while grading.