PETCHA: a programming exercises teaching assistant

  • Authors:
  • Ricardo Alexandre Peixoto Queirós;José Paulo Leal

  • Affiliations:
  • CRACS & INESC-Porto LA & DI-ESEIG/IPP, Porto, Portugal;CRACS & INESC-Porto LA, Faculty of Sciences, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 17th ACM annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
  • Year:
  • 2012

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

This paper presents a tool called Petcha that acts as an automated Teaching Assistant in computer programming courses. The ultimate objective of Petcha is to increase the number of programming exercises effectively solved by students. Petcha meets this objective by helping both teachers to author programming exercises and students to solve them. It also coordinates a network of heterogeneous systems, integrating automatic program evaluators, learning management systems, learning object repositories and integrated programming environments. This paper presents the concept and the design of Petcha and sets this tool in a service oriented architecture for managing learning processes based on the automatic evaluation of programming exercises. The paper presents also a case study that validates the use of Petcha and of the proposed architecture.