Modelling an e-learning environment for learning programming languages

It is widely accepted that solving programming exercises is fundamental to learn how to program. Nevertheless, solving exercises is only effective if students receive an assessment on their work. An exercise solved wrong will consolidate a false belief, and without feedback many students will not be able to overcome their difficulties. However, creating, managing and accessing a large number of exercises, covering all the points in the curricula of a programming course, in classes with large number of students, can be a daunting task without the appropriated tools working in unison. This involves a diversity of tools, from the environments where programs are coded, to automatic program evaluators providing feedback on the attempts of students, passing through the authoring, management and sequencing of programming exercises as learning objects. We believe that the integration of these tools will have a great impact in acquiring programming skills. Our research objective is to manage and coordinate a network of eLearning systems where students can solve computer programming exercises. Networks of this kind include systems such as learning management systems (LMS), evaluation engines (EE), learning objects repositories (LOR) and exercise resolution environments (ERE). Our strategy to achieve the interoperability among these tools is based on a shared definition of programming exercise as a Learning Object (LO).

Ensemble: an innovative approach to practice computer programming

Currently, the teaching-learning process in domains, such as computer programming, is characterized by an extensive curricula and a high enrolment of students. This poses a great workload for faculty and teaching assistants responsible for the creation, delivery, and assessment of student exercises. The main goal of this chapter is to foster practice-based learning in complex domains. This objective is attained with an e-learning framework—called Ensemble—as a conceptual tool to organize and facilitate technical interoperability among services. The Ensemble framework is used on a specific domain: computer programming. Content issues are tacked with a standard format to describe programming exercises as learning objects. Communication is achieved with the extension of existing specifications for the interoperation with several systems typically found in an e-learning environment. In order to evaluate the acceptability of the proposed solution, an Ensemble instance was validated on a classroom experiment with encouraging results.