Abstract:

The need for computer-assisted evaluation of programming tasks has existed at the University of Debrecen ever since IT education began at the Faculty of Informatics. The introduction of automatic evaluation was mainly driven by the dynamically growing number of students. As a result, a number of smaller and larger applications were developed which automated the compilation, execution, and evaluation process.

Although there were a lot of similar programs in the past, and many of them were deployed in national and international competitions, we saw the need to develop our own software to fully serve local needs. Based on previous experience, we created a single system integrating the automatic evaluation of programming competitions, examinations, and exercises in 2011. The system has been proven in numerous national and international competitions, so we found the time was ripe to offer it to users outside our university, such as high school, college, and university teachers. We believe that this knowledge and these resources can contribute to the success of secondary school programming education. We hope to give teachers a tool that will make it easier for them to evaluate programming tasks.

In this article, we compare our system, called ProgCont (Programming Contest), with other applications that perform similar tasks. In addition, we would like to introduce the API of ProgCont developed for the public, its capabilities, as well as the method we use to perform the evaluation.

Keywords:

ProgCont system, automated evaluation, programming.