Abstract:

For several years the course “Algorithms and Programming for Engineers” teaches the basics of the Java programming language as well as some fundamentals of algorithms to engineering students in their first semester at the Technische Universität Ilmenau. One chapter of the course gives an introduction into object oriented programming (OOP) with Java. Aside of the fact that most of the future engineers have serious problems learning to program with a language like Java, it is also important to state that the time for the students in the planned exercises is usually much too short. The general solution for those problems is to offer online tools for interactive online training (including automatic feedback from an evaluation server) as well as tutorials for personal feedback supplied by a tutor. In the past there was no online tool to support self-determined training of OOP-tasks. To close this gap as well as to support the manual evaluation of the paper based tests (those will still have to be used in the next years), a generator for OOP-tasks was created, which supports the training during the semester but also supports the design of exam tasks as well as fitting evaluation schemes. The latter is important for a fair assessment of the hundreds of solutions which are usually checked by more than one person.

The full paper will describe the degrees of freedom of the generator, the different kinds of supported output and the their use cases in the context of the course. Focuses lie on variable task texts (which are important to avoid fixation onto certain formulations), on example solutions and according hints, on the support of multilingualism as well as on the advantage of special input masks for the solutions (to evaluate the often erroneous solutions of the students in a more appropriate way). A further aspect discussed in the paper is the generation of the evaluation schemes for the automatic evaluation in the exercise phase as well as the manual assessment in the exam phase and how they can reflect the often partial knowledge of the students reasonably.

Keywords:

Algorithms and programming for engineers, Java, object oriented programming, input masks, evaluation schemes, computer based support for paper based exams.