Authors:
Eduard Frankford
1
;
Daniel Crazzolara
1
;
Michael Vierhauser
1
;
Niklas Meißner
2
;
Stephan Krusche
3
and
Ruth Breu
1
Affiliations:
1
University of Innsbruck, Department of Computer Science, Austria
;
2
University of Stuttgart, Institute of Software Engineering, Germany
;
3
Technical University of Munich, School of Computation, Information and Technology, Germany
Keyword(s):
Teaching Tools, Automated Programming Assessment Systems, Integrated Development Environments, Artemis, Advanced Learning Technologies.
Abstract:
The increasing demand for programmers has led to a surge in participants in programming courses, making it increasingly challenging for instructors to assess student code manually. As a result, automated programming assessment systems (APASs) have been developed to streamline this process. These APASs support lecturers by managing and evaluating student programming exercises at scale. However, these tools often do not provide feature-rich online editors compared to their traditional integrated development environments (IDEs) counterparts. This absence of key features, such as syntax highlighting and autocompletion, can negatively impact the learning experience, as these tools are crucial for effective coding practice. To address this gap, this research contributes to the field of programming education by extracting and defining requirements for an online IDE in an educational context and presenting a prototypical implementation of an open-source solution for a scalable and secure onl
ine IDE. The usability of the new online IDE was assessed using the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), gathering feedback from 27 first-year students through a structured survey. In addition to these qualitative insights, quantitative measures such as memory (RAM) usage were evaluated to determine the efficiency and scalability of the tool under varying usage conditions.
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