AN EXPERIMENTAL PROTOTYPE FOR AUTOMATICALLY TESTING STUDENT PROGRAMS USING TOKEN PATTERNS

Chung Man Tang, Yuen Tak Yu, Chung Keung Poon

2010

Abstract

Automated systems and tools for assessing student programs are now commonly used for enhancing the teaching and learning of computer programming. However, many such systems employ rudimentary techniques in comparing program outputs when testing student programs for determining their correctness. These comparison techniques are typically inflexible and disallow even slight deviations of program output which a human assessor would normally tolerate. This may give rise to student frustrations and other undesirable pedagogical issues that can undermine the benefits of using these assessment tools. This paper presents an experimental prototype we have developed that adopts a token-pattern-based approach to accommodate more tolerant output comparisons in testing student programs, followed by a preliminary validation of the prototype by showing how it can be configured to handle the assessment of variants of program outputs.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Man Tang C., Tak Yu Y. and Keung Poon C. (2010). AN EXPERIMENTAL PROTOTYPE FOR AUTOMATICALLY TESTING STUDENT PROGRAMS USING TOKEN PATTERNS . In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 2: CSEDU, ISBN 978-989-674-024-5, pages 144-149. DOI: 10.5220/0002800301440149

in Bibtex Style

@conference{csedu10,
author={Chung Man Tang and Yuen Tak Yu and Chung Keung Poon},
title={AN EXPERIMENTAL PROTOTYPE FOR AUTOMATICALLY TESTING STUDENT PROGRAMS USING TOKEN PATTERNS},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 2: CSEDU,},
year={2010},
pages={144-149},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0002800301440149},
isbn={978-989-674-024-5},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 2: CSEDU,
TI - AN EXPERIMENTAL PROTOTYPE FOR AUTOMATICALLY TESTING STUDENT PROGRAMS USING TOKEN PATTERNS
SN - 978-989-674-024-5
AU - Man Tang C.
AU - Tak Yu Y.
AU - Keung Poon C.
PY - 2010
SP - 144
EP - 149
DO - 10.5220/0002800301440149