An Automated Environment for Teaching Programming Logic on

Distance Learning IT Courses

Nelson Ion de Oliveira

, Marcel Vin

ıcius Medeiros de Oliveira

and Jorge Tarc

ısio da Rocha Falc

Metropole Digital Institute, Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Natal/RN, Brazil

Department of Informatics and Applied Mathematics, Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Natal/RN, Brazil

Department of Psychology, Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Natal/RN, Brazil

Keywords:

Teaching of Programming, Interactive Didactic Material, e-Learning.

Abstract:

Disciplines devoted to teaching programming are present in all courses in the area of information technology

and traditionally they are part of the basic structure of these courses. For this reason the discipline of pro-

gramming logic has been the gateway for information technology students. These disciplines have presented

a high rate of students failures because it requires the students to have a high level of abstraction associated

with systematized reasoning. The main objective of this article is to present an interactive environment that is

seamlessly inserted in a e-course didactic material in order to expand the offer of effective learning automated

mediators. This feature turns the teaching material into an interactive tool, which is more attractive to students

and likely to help them in succeeding in these programming courses.

1 INTRODUCTION

The discipline of programming logic, traditionally,

has been the gateway for students in the area of infor-

mation technology. This discipline requires the stu-

dents to have a high level of abstraction associated

with systematized reasoning, which together, form

the necessary cognition needed for describing actions

in a step by step manner in order to construct pro-

grams that will generate the desired results. This is

the main reason for high failure rate in the discipline

of programming logic.

Since 2012, the Metropole Digital Institute of the

Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte has been

developing a technical distance learning program (in

the semipresencial mode) in the area of information

technology. The discipline of Programming Logic is

part of the common core of this program and, over

the last six years, a collection of didactic material has

been developed to offer support to the approximately

1,680 students who ingress each year in this course.

The main objective of this work is to present a

technological resource that we developed, an pro-

gramming environment which we integrated to the

current model of the didactic material of the disci-

pline Programming Logic of the course. This new

feature effectively expanded the offer of learning me-

diators and, as a consequence, fosters an increment

in the current success rates in this discipline. Such a

change, in addition, turns the teaching material into a

more attractive one to students. This intervention was

developed as a result of a master’s degree research, in

which descriptive frequency analysis was performed

on quantitative data about the academic performance

of 2,500 students from the ﬁrst semesters of the years

2015 and 2016. In addition to questionnaires with

more than 600 students for identifying the socio-

pedagogical proﬁle of these students.

In the analysis of the academic scores of the stu-

dents sample, from which the students who droped the

course were removed, a correlation of approximately

R = 0.96 was veriﬁed between the ﬁnal (semester) av-

erage of the student with the discipline of Program-

ming Logic, that is, students with the high average

in this subject presented higher results in the set of

subjects of the semester. This result made it clear the

importance of this discipline to the students’ overall

performance in the course.

In the applied questionnaires it was also veriﬁed

that the majority of the students have a computer and

easy access to the Internet in their residences. In

addition, it has been detected that the students are

constantly consuming informational and instructional

content from Internet sources.

As a result of our initial researches, an interven-

tion proposal was implemented and inserted in the

Ion de Oliveira, N., Medeiros de Oliveira, M. and Falcão, J.

An Automated Environment for Teaching Programming Logic on Distance Learning IT Courses.

DOI: 10.5220/0006704602670274

In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2018), pages 267-274

ISBN: 978-989-758-291-2

267

didactic material used in the discipline of Program-

ming Logic of the referred course. The functionali-

ties were elicited from the data obtained in the applied

questionnaires and from the analysis of platforms and

environments for the teaching of programming that

were indicated by the students, such as Codecademy

and Khan Academy. The research team experience

as course mediators and teachers was also a source of

inspiration for the environment requirements.

The resource was developed and integrated in the

didactic material that allows the student in program-

ming exercises, using a high level programming lan-

guage that uses commands written in their mother lan-

guage and submit their answers as “programs” that

are evaluated through an automated process.

By including an automated evaluation process in-

tegrated with the didactic material of our technical

courses, our development turned this material into a

interactive and more attractive one. This interactivity

includes automated correction of algorithms and a full

access to evaluation results to the students, who will

be more effective in deciding its learning timing.

2 BACKGROUND

E-learning refers only to teaching modalities whose

learning is not linked to the physical presence of the

students, and the didactic content is made available

through various communication vehicles, such as the

postal and broadcasting system, and television. Some

authors (Piva-Junior et al., 2011) argue that one of

the great problems of this modality is the difﬁculty

of students to interact in the learning process. This

limits the exchange of experiences between them, as

well as the difﬁculty of solving doubts with teachers

or other colleagues because of the limitations of one-

way communication of the ﬁrst mass media.

Used successfully in on-line education processes,

virtual learning environments that provide activities

with automatic correction and feedback are often

used. The elaboration of well-structured tasks can

lead the student to make questions and consequently

discoveries, promoting the students’ conduction to

deeper levels of learning. The automatic feedback

offers the students a quick access to the expected re-

sponse for the exercises he answered and allows a bet-

ter planning of his evolution in the course.

The contents are presented through the didactic

material, that is the instrument that should guaran-

tee the “dialogue” between the teacher and the stu-

dent (Preti, 2009). Thus, there is a clear and ulti-

mate need for this material to be as interesting and

attractive as possible, becoming a positive mediator

between teaching and learning.

The E-learning class should aim for activity-

centered learning and interactivity that encour-

age knowledge building and problem-solving (Preti,

2009). The construction of teaching tools that aid

programming teaching should have clear and precise

learning objectives, with a language whose form and

meaning are clear and contextualized, associated with

a well-articulated information architecture.

In (Belloni, 2003), the author argues that the main

characteristic of the Digital Information and Com-

munication Technologies (DICT) is the interactivity,

technical characteristic that means the possibility of

the user interacting with a machine. In this sense, in-

teraction refers to the action between subjects, medi-

ated or not by a technology.

It is noteworthy that in E-learning, the teacher

does not go along with the class. Therefore, he is un-

able to explain again and to look at the student and

realize that he did not understand the subject. This

aspect of teaching ratiﬁes even more the importance

of having the maximum possible interaction between

the student and the didactic material made available.

This emphasizes the relevance of didactic mate-

rial in E-learning, because in face-to-face teaching the

materials complement the direct action of the teacher.

In E-learning, the integration and complementarity of

the materials used to establish the effectiveness of the

student’s link with knowledge. However, as a mat-

ter of fact, the teaching material does not replace the

teacher (Possolli and de Quadros Cury, 2009).

In (Possolli and de Quadros Cury, 2009), the au-

thors list four main characteristics that can be identi-

ﬁed as essential for E-learning materials. Essentially,

such material should be interactive, dialogic, multi-

media and they should stimulate learner autonomy.

In this way, it is veriﬁed that the E-learning didactic

material must maintain a contextualization with the

content, stimulate the action and the thought of the

learner so that it can construct meanings in its learning

process, besides fomenting the search for autonomy.

3 THE CONTEXT OF COURSE

The technical courses offered by the Metropole Digi-

tal Institute are structured in 4 modules: Basic, Inter-

mediate, Advanced and Integrator. All incoming stu-

dents must take the basic module, common to all em-

phases. At the end of the basic module, the students

who succeed must chose one of the available em-

phases: Industrial Automation, Electronics, Internet

Programming, Programming of Digital Games and

Computer Networks.

CSEDU 2018 - 10th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

268

The Basic Module has a total workload of 280

hours and it is distributed in 6 subjects (Table 1).

Table 1: Subjects of the Basic Module of the Technical

Courses of the Department Name.

Subjects Subject Load

Introduction to Information 60h

Technologies

Technical English I 40h

Applied Mathematics 40h

Computer Architectures 20h

Programming Logic 60h

Operacional Systems 60h

The student approved in the basic module deﬁnes,

at the beginning of the next semester, the emphasis

in which he wishes to proceed. From this point, the

student has contact with more speciﬁc subjects in the

chosen area. In the intermediate module, there are

subjects in common between two or more emphases.

Upon successful completion of the intermediate

module, the student proceeds to the advanced module

of the area selected in the previous semester. In this

module, the amount of common subjects between the

emphases decreases, and the content is more speciﬁc

in each emphasis, offering an opportunity for the stu-

dent to deepen his knowledge in the chosen area.

Students have face-to-face (on-campus) and vir-

tual meetings with a mediator on a weekly basis. The

classes are composed of 40 students at most, with a

mediator that supervises the development of the ac-

tivities in both on-campus and virtual meetings. The

activities of this mediator in the weekly meetings are:

to provide support for the student with the resolution

of exercises and to answer questions about the week

subjects in the virtual environment.

3.1 The Didactic Material Technologic

Structure

Our didactic materials are made available to the

Technical Courses students through an on-line plat-

form, which uses the same technologies adopted in

modern applications for the web: In the front end

uses HTML5

, CSS

with materialized CSS

and

JavaScript allied with jQuery

. In the back-end we

use PHP and a PostgreSQL database.

In spite of this “technological power”, the educa-

tional resources employed are limited to that of a book

HyperText Markup Language version 5.

Cascading Style Sheets.

Framework CSS that implements Material Design.

JavaScript Library.

in digital format by allowing content to be viewed

through various types of devices, including mobile

devices.

Focusing on the contents of the teaching mate-

rial of Programming Logic, we observed that they

are composed of three items: text, images and short

videos. The contents are predominantly arranged

through texts with images and are complemented with

videos in most classes. These videos began to be pro-

duced and inserted in the teaching materials from the

ﬁrst semester of 2014, as a ﬁrst proposal to make the

presentation of the contents more dynamic and to ini-

tiate with the use of computational resources to pro-

duce richer materials.

This analysis allowed us to conclude that the di-

dactic material of the Programming Logic discipline

was predominantly static, despite the presence of the

videos, since it does not allow interactivity. Accord-

ing to (Silva, 2001), interactivity allows students to

go beyond the condition of passive spectator to the

condition of operative subject, understood as an ex-

change of actions, control over events and modiﬁca-

tion of contents, which does not occur with the didac-

tic material we analyzed.

4 THE AUTOMATED

ENVIRONMENT

The resource developed is a group of technologies to

create an environment with a code editor in which the

student can write his algorithms in response to exer-

cises proposed in the the didactic material. This en-

vironment was constructed to improve the experience

of the student of e-learning courses and to expand the

learning mediators, more speciﬁcally for Program-

ming Logic.

In the application of the questionnaires the stu-

dents were asked if they knew any interactive plat-

form for teaching programming. The majority (37%

of the 207 participants) mentioned the Codecademy

platform; the second most indicated platform was the

Khan Academy, which obtained a percentage of 19%

of the answers.

From this point of view, an evaluation was made

of the learning mediators used by these platforms for

the context of Programming Logic. In general, both

require an autonomous learning. It is important to

emphasize that within the context of the e-learning,

the student dictates the own pace of learning, accord-

ing to his performance in conducting his studies. Au-

tonomous learning happens when the student has the

initiative, regardless of an academic need, seeking to

obtain certain knowledge.

An Automated Environment for Teaching Programming Logic on Distance Learning IT Courses

269

It is known that one of the premises for learning

and developing programming skills is a constant prac-

tice. The two platforms mentioned by the students

seek to teach this knowledge through the use of ex-

amples and exercises.

In general, these platforms have characteristics

of tutorial or exercise-and-practice software (Valente,

2008). Such platforms need a student interaction with

the tools. There is, hence, a clear need for interaction

on the part of the student that should provide answers

to proposed activities and should, as a consequence,

receive feedback from the platform.

It is important to notice that interactivity is the

main premise of these platforms, Codecademy and

Khan Academy. According to (Fardo, 2013), through

interactive platforms, they also seek to create an im-

mersion environment with the purpose of motivating

individuals to act, assisting in problem-solving and

promoting learning. Thus, the resource that is pre-

sented in this paper opens the possibility, in the con-

text of the discipline of Programming Logic, of the

students to carry out their exercises with interactivity

within the didactic material.

The use of tools that allow interaction has been

demonstrated to have positive results. A study pre-

sented in (Lee and Ko, 2015), demonstrated an im-

provement of up to 40% in the success rate of

programming courses with interactive tools such as

Codecademy.

Through the strategy of interactivity of platforms,

the level of action and reaction increases, leading to

small challenges or tasks that, when completed, give

the student a score and a feedback on the activity per-

formed. This scoring strategy is adopted by most of

the platforms, as well as in those evaluated and devel-

oped in this work. It leads to a greater involvement of

the student with the platform. As a consequence, the

student will, seamlessly, perform a greater amount of

tasks (Fardo, 2013).

In our work, we used tools that could be integrated

with the technologies used in the teaching material

platform. In addition to the technical requirements

for integration and coupling, licensing matters were

also taken into account. We, therefore, deﬁned that

the resources of third parties that were to be integrated

in our proposal should be open source. This require-

ment was also a consequence of a clear need for cus-

tomization which could arise during integration with

the teaching materials technologies.

The teaching materials used are made available

through a web platform with technologies that are

used in the development of web sites or systems. The

use of these technologies removes the need for any

software installation: only a compatible web browser

is needed.

4.1 Used Technologies

The teaching materials was initially produced for the

technical courses and are maintained by the Multime-

dia Production Sector (MPS) of the Metropole Digital

Institute. The ﬁrst step in our work was to adapt the

existing technological structure, presented in Table 2.

Table 2: Initial Technology Architecture.

Technology

Cloud Server with Linux Operating System

Apache application as HTTP server

PHP programming language

Framework JavaScript jQuery

Framework CSS Materialize

PostgreSQL Database

These technologies established some of the non-

functional requirements, such as the use of the PHP

programming language, PostgreSQL DBMS, in addi-

tion to the frameworks Materialize CSS and jQuery.

The Khan Academy and Codecademy platforms,

indicated by the students in the application of the

questionnaires, were considered in this study. The

structures of these platforms have been evaluated in

interface aspects, existing functionalities, and student

interaction features. Both platforms have common

characteristics and the main one is the presence of a

text ﬁeld to insert the responses of the activities.

The resources presented in the programming

courses were evaluated. Both environments have the

text ﬁeld with features that simulate a source code ed-

itor and some other features present in software devel-

opment IDEs. Among other existing features, we em-

phasize the presence of syntax highlighting, which is

the speciﬁc formatting, usually with the use of colors,

in the programming languages keywords. This visual

feature allows the student to detect when a language

command in their work was not correctly spelled. It

also allows visual aid in the identiﬁcation of variables

and data.

Thus, one of the mandatory requirements detected

from the analyses performed on the Khan Academy

and Codecademy platforms was the need for a code

editor with syntax highlighting, which would neces-

sarily work from a web browser.

Faced with this requirement, we searched for an

open source text editor for web pages. Our research

lead us to CodeMirror (CodeMirror, 2017), an open

source text editor implemented in JavaScript, which

mets the requirements already mentioned. Its main

functionality is to allow the editing of source codes

CSEDU 2018 - 10th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

270

within a web page and natively has several language

modes. It also allows the addition of new functionali-

ties through extension modules (plugins).

The ofﬁcial documentation of CodeMirror was

studied, followed by tests of integration of the com-

ponent with the didactic material of the Technical

Courses targeted for this work. After the coding pro-

cess, it was possible to succeed in the integration

test. Since this feature met the initial requirements,

CodeMirror was adopted as our web code editor.

4.1.1 The Potigol Language

With the deﬁnition of the tool to be used for writing

codes, the next step of the research consisted in the

deﬁnition of the programming language that should

be used in the interaction between the student and the

proposed exercises.

In our case, the discipline of Programming Logic

is projected to develop a structured reasoning to de-

velop computing solutions to small problems. The

discipline used a tool called (VisuAlg, 2016). This

software runs only under the Windows operating sys-

tem and therefore does not meet the needs of a cross-

platform application.

Although its license is free for use and distribu-

tion, it is not open source, what makes it extremely

difﬁcult to customize to meet speciﬁc needs. In the

case of this work, one of our requirements is to make

the tool available to online (hence, multiplatform) ex-

ecution. Therefore, no feasible solution was found to

integrate it into our didactic material of the discipline

of Programming Logic. Otherwise, the student would

needed to download VisuAlg in order to develop and

test the exercises.

The fact that you do not need to install any soft-

ware to perform the exercises allows the student to

study the discipline and test their algorithms on any

computer connected to the Internet. Consequently, if

the student needs to use a ‘LAN house’ or a third-

party computer, he should not face problems during

his studies. This is a relevant element since the di-

versity of places where the student has access to the

Internet was observed in the answers to the question-

naires. Therefore, given the limitations of VisuAlg

that were presented, we chose not to use it in this re-

search.

This limiting technical factor of VisuAlg rein-

forced the search for a language that met the re-

quirement of being open source and allowing integra-

tion with CodeMirror. A viable option was Potigol,

a new multi-paradigm programming language spe-

cially designed for beginners, with a Portuguese syn-

tax (Potigol, 2016). The creators of Potigol claim that

(Lucena and Lucena, 2016):

The main objective of introductory program-

ming courses is to enable students to express

solutions to problems using a programming

language. A programming language for be-

ginners needs to be able to express algorithmic

solutions in a natural way. The language must

not be an obstacle. So it needs to be expressive

and simple with an intuitive syntax. Potigol’s

syntax is inspired in dynamically-typed lan-

guages, which are well known for their sim-

ple syntax. Type inference makes statically-

typed languages look like dynamically-typed

languages. The programmer does not need to

explicitly deﬁne the type of variables.

The authors (Noschanga et al., 2014) also argue

that programming teaching should focus on problem

solving skills, learning a programming language as a

secondary aspect, and the low ﬂuency of students in

the English language can also interfere with the pro-

cess of learning.

In view of the above, and after initial analysis

of the technical characteristics of Potigol, an evalu-

ation was carried out to verify the integration with

CodeMirror. This evaluation began with the reading

of the ofﬁcial Potigol language documentation.

The next step consisted in the conﬁguration of a

local testing environment with all the resources of the

current didactic material of the Technical Courses of

the Specialized Academic Unit. Then, one of the

pages in the Programming Logic material was se-

lected. In the next step, the necessary procedures for

the inclusion of CodeMirror were realized.

Next, Potigol was integrated to our environment,

with a minimum resource implementation in PHP. Af-

ter the development of such codes, it was possible to

perform the communication between CodeMirror and

Potigol through PHP and that was already adopted in

the platform of the existing didactic material.

The test environment made it possible to commu-

nicate between the CodeMirror and Potigol compo-

nents by running an algorithm “Hello, world!” on the

server. At the end of the execution of the algorithm,

the output generated by the test was sent in response

to the AJAX request and then presented in the user

interface. The successful technical test of integration

resulted in the choice of Potigol as the programming

language of the enviroment proposed in this study.

4.2 The Interaction Tool

The Figure 1 shows of use cases that were elicited.

The features that are highlighted in the Use Case Di-

agram were implemented in the current version of the

tool: (i) Do Exercise; (ii) See execution feedback; (iii)

An Automated Environment for Teaching Programming Logic on Distance Learning IT Courses

271

Figure 1: Use Cases Diagram.

See my completed workout scores; and (iv) Run my

algorithm, the user case considered of the greater risk

was marked with *, which was successfully achieved

4.3 The Tool’s Architecture

The implemented architecture uses Asynchronous

Javascript and XML communication were used. This

feature aims to prevent the page loaded in the stu-

dent’s browser from undergoing a new loading pro-

cess. All communication required for the “Test My

Algorithm” use cases, responsible for the feedback

feature, and “View my completed exercise notes”,

made use of AJAX communication to maintain an un-

ﬁlled page experience.

The student, when using the tool proposed in this

work, only needs to write their algorithm and to push

the feedback button. This starts the process of veri-

fying his response. First, the tool sends the student’s

algorithm to the web server. This communication oc-

curs through an asynchronous AJAX request and post

type

type.

When the server receives the request, it checks

whether the user is authenticated and has permissions

One of the request methods performed through the

HTTP protocol.

to execute the method that will trigger the procedure

to construct the response to the user. Then, the infor-

mation sent by the user is retrieved: (i) class number;

(ii) the number of exercise; (iii) and the student’s al-

gorithm.

After retrieving this information, to reduce the

chances of losing the algorithm sent by the student,

the tool ﬁrst persists the algorithm in the database.

Only then, it starts the scoring process.

The next step after the persistence in the DBMS

is the writing of the algorithm in the ﬁle system of

the operating system. This procedure is necessary, so

far, to execute the codes in Potigol, since for the ex-

ecution of the algorithms written in this language we

need to save their text ﬁles. It is worth noting that

these ﬁles are saved in a temporary directory and soon

after the tests they are removed. The submitted algo-

rithm, though, is stored in the database.

4.4 The Scoring Process

The “scoring” process of the algorithm is performed

with the execution of black-box tests. These tests are

deﬁned by the teachers, who are responsible for the

construction of the questions of these exercises to be

applied through the didactic material. In addition to

the input data, it is also necessary to provide the out-

put data that must be generated by the correct algo-

rithm.

This process of automatic correction of algorithms

is described in (Pelz et al., 2012) as a dynamic ap-

proach, situation in which the algorithm is executed

a certain number of times with known inputs. If the

output values match the expected values the algorithm

is considered correct. We use some variations to de-

ﬁne a score for the student’s algorithm ranging from

a completely exact answer to an incorrect answer.

With the use of this dynamic approach of correc-

tion of algorithms, it is essential to have test cases for

each question. This amount will always be intrinsic

to the developed exercise.

In this way, each question proposed in the didactic

material must have a speciﬁc test bench to be used in

the process of correction of the algorithm produced

by the student. Each exercise has a different problem

and, for this reason, the test bench should be speciﬁc

to each question.

The student’s algorithm is executed once for each

test input that have been deﬁned for the question. At

each test of the student’s algorithm, the system as-

signs a note according to the similarity to the expected

response.

At the end of the test cycle of the question, the

average of the exercise is calculated as a simple arith-

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272

Figure 2: The Tool’s Layout.

metic average of the test cases. The mean score is

then persisted in the database and presented in the stu-

dent’s grading chart.

Table 3 presents the scores attributed by type of

error detected in the evaluation of the outputs gener-

ated by the student’s algorithm. It is reinforced that

the procedure is an aid to the student to obtain feed-

back quickly, positive or negative, for the exercise

performed and in this way can make the decision to

ask for help or investigate the result and its algorithm

from the feedback generated by the tool.

Table 3: Table of levels score by type error veriﬁcation.

Differences Level Score

No differences, the answer is correct 10.0

There are differences only in blank lines 9.5

There are differences only from spaces 9.5

to plus/minus

There are only uppercase/lowercase 9.0

differences

There are differences between lines 9.0

and blank spaces

There are differences between blank lines 8.5

There are differences in spaces, lines, 7.0

and upper / lower case

Unfortunately the answer is not correct 0

4.5 The Tool’s Interfaces

Figure 2 shows two interfaces (separated by the dot-

ted line) used by the student. In the ﬁrst interface,

in its upper region in the dark color region, the ex-

ercise statement is shown in the center and, below it,

the CodeMirror text editor. In the same interface, two

buttons are presented: “Test My Algorithm” which is

responsible for starting the process that will perform

the tests in the student algorithm and “View Language

Syntax”, which opens the page with the documenta-

tion simpliﬁed syntax of the Potigol language.

Below the buttons, there are three tabs: Result,

Generated Output, and My Scores. The ﬁrst tab is

intended for the general feedback of the algorithm.

The second one presents the printed output for each

student’s execution and respective scores.

The last tab lists the notes for the exercises an-

swered by the student and also counts the average

grade of each class, calculated from the exercises al-

ready answered by the learner. This is the right-hand

interface in Figure 2.

The interfaces presented were planned with a fo-

cus on simplicity, without harming the presentation

of the information. Thus, in these two interfaces, the

statement of a proposed exercise and its general feed-

back and the notes frame that of the exercises per-

formed by the student are present. The interface with

the detailing of the feedback for each execution of

the exercise is accessed by the option ”Output Gen-

erated”.

The authors (Pelz et al., 2012) defend, from real-

ized experiments, that the feedback provided by au-

tomatic correction mechanisms have pedagogical po-

tential. In this way, the presence of feedback can al-

low the student to reﬂect on their development and

learning and can decide to progress in their studies or

review some speciﬁc content.

An Automated Environment for Teaching Programming Logic on Distance Learning IT Courses

273

5 CONCLUSIONS

In this paper, we presented an environment with in-

teractivity resources in the didactic materials of the

discipline of Programming Logic of the Technical

Courses of a teaching institution. This environment

allows the students to have autonomy over their stud-

ies, obtaining feedback for the programming exer-

cises, which can be executed within the teaching ma-

terial itself. Considering that the autonomy of the stu-

dent is one of the pillars of e-learning, didactic ma-

terials with dialogic language, multimedia resources

and interactivity can be extremely important in the

construction of the knowledge of the subject that is

learning.

Thus, it is understood that this study considered

two pillars placed on the basis of e-learning: interac-

tive didactic material and student autonomy. Given

this, it is believed that a didactic material (with di-

alogic language) enriched with the multimedia re-

sources, associated with the interaction resource with

automated feedback allows the students to develop

further their autonomy and their programming abil-

ities related to the contents of the discipline of Pro-

gramming logic.

The inclusion of the resource for dynamic algo-

rithm correction modiﬁes positively contributing to

the development of the programming abilities of the

new students since they can obtain a faster return to

their exercises and thus decide if they should continue

to advance in the contents discipline or review other

content.

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