Code Expert

An online learning environment for programming

Hermann Lehner, ETHZ

To facilitate a scalable computer science education without sacrificing quality, we created Code Expert, an independent online IDE that allows thousands of students at ETH to work on open programming tasks in exercises and exams. The system provides immediate feedback to the students by running the code against given tests, static analysers, or any other means of automatic feedback generation a lecturer chooses to integrate. Finally, students can submit projects that get automatically graded immediately as well as manually reviewed by tutors.

An interesting aspect of the platform is its ability to record the evolution of a student's approach from start to end and allows the student to mark intermediate states in order to revert back to them to try out different approaches if a certain decision didn't work out. Furthermore, it is possible to see when and how often students compile or run their programme, and even how they interact with the running programme. The provided data can help to better understand the individual learning process.

We present the platform and outline exciting opportunities in various areas of educational engineering that such an open system provides – especially in computer science education.