TY - GEN
T1 - Teaching and learning programming and software engineering via interactive gaming
AU - Tillmann, Nikolai
AU - De Halleux, Jonathan
AU - Xie, Tao
AU - Gulwani, Sumit
AU - Bishop, Judith
PY - 2013
Y1 - 2013
N2 - Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have recently gained high popularity among various universities and even in global societies. A critical factor for their success in teaching and learning effectiveness is assignment grading. Traditional ways of assignment grading are not scalable and do not give timely or interactive feedback to students. To address these issues, we present an interactive-gaming-based teaching and learning platform called Pex4Fun. Pex4Fun is a browser-based teaching and learning environment targeting teachers and students for introductory to advanced programming or software engineering courses. At the core of the platform is an automated grading engine based on symbolic execution. In Pex4Fun, teachers can create virtual classrooms, customize existing courses, and publish new learning material including learning games. Pex4Fun was released to the public in June 2010 and since then the number of attempts made by users to solve games has reached over one million. Our work on Pex4Fun illustrates that a sophisticated software engineering technique - automated test generation - can be successfully used to underpin automatic grading in an online programming system that can scale to hundreds of thousands of users.
AB - Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have recently gained high popularity among various universities and even in global societies. A critical factor for their success in teaching and learning effectiveness is assignment grading. Traditional ways of assignment grading are not scalable and do not give timely or interactive feedback to students. To address these issues, we present an interactive-gaming-based teaching and learning platform called Pex4Fun. Pex4Fun is a browser-based teaching and learning environment targeting teachers and students for introductory to advanced programming or software engineering courses. At the core of the platform is an automated grading engine based on symbolic execution. In Pex4Fun, teachers can create virtual classrooms, customize existing courses, and publish new learning material including learning games. Pex4Fun was released to the public in June 2010 and since then the number of attempts made by users to solve games has reached over one million. Our work on Pex4Fun illustrates that a sophisticated software engineering technique - automated test generation - can be successfully used to underpin automatic grading in an online programming system that can scale to hundreds of thousands of users.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84886444714&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84886444714&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/ICSE.2013.6606662
DO - 10.1109/ICSE.2013.6606662
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84886444714
SN - 9781467330763
T3 - Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering
SP - 1117
EP - 1126
BT - 2013 35th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2013 - Proceedings
T2 - 2013 35th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2013
Y2 - 18 May 2013 through 26 May 2013
ER -