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assessment, since students are followed closely and
measured for their evolution and implicit effort. All
these ingredients contribute to augment the students
motivation and enthusiasm.
5 CONCLUSION
We discussed the difficulties inbred in teaching
and learning Programming Languages and proposed
iQuimera, a system developed in the scope of com-
puter aided education to help making this process
more successful through problem-solving paradigm.
iQuimera extends Quimera, an hybrid (static and dy-
namic) Automatic Grading System (AGS) in what
concerns students evaluation approaches.
Our contribution is two fold. On one hand, we
propose a more flexible assessment model accept-
ing answers that have syntactic differences (although
semantically correct), and also partially correct an-
swers. On the other hand, we propose to apply Con-
tinuous Integration (CI) principles for a continuous
assessment of group elements.
Although iQuimera requires more configuration
effort from the three actors enrolled than the tradi-
tional AGS—more time to specify the problem, test
vectors, and grading mechanisms (teacher), to man-
age all the participants and processes (admin), and to
use the system in collaborative mode (students), as
well as, more sensibility to tune appropriately the sys-
tem (teacher)—, it is not an effort necessary each time
someone wants to use the system, but it shall be done
only once per course or exercise. Thus, we believe
that this configuration effort is surpassed by the ad-
vantages iQuimera provides with CI and Flexible Dy-
namic Analysis adoption.
We plan (1) to finish the implementation of the
Flexible Dynamic Analyser and the CI engine; (2)
to develop new front ends in order for iQuimera to
accept other programming languages than C; (3) to
extend iQuimera such that it performs with minimal
students intervention. Afterwards, we plan to test
iQuimera with real users by means of a carefully
sketched real case study, in order to verify its useful-
ness and benefits.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work is funded by National Funds through
the FCT - Fundac¸
˜
ao para a Ci
ˆ
encia e Tecnologia
(Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology)
within project ”Projeto Estrat
´
egico - UI 752 - 2011-
2012 - Ref. PEst-OE/EEI/UI0752/2011”.
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