Abstract:

Timely feedback on assessments is critical to student success. Without this students are unsure if their performance is meeting the objectives of the module. Automated feedback and assessment can alleviate this issue by providing students with instant feedback on a submission and also a corresponding grade. MULE is an automated feedback and assessment tool used within first year undergraduate computer science labs to allow students complete weekly assessments around weekly core concepts. MULE allows the lecturers to create programming questions for the students and display them when required. In order for these labs to be created, MULE needs a number files at the backend that allow MULE to show the students their lab and also get their code graded.

The files needed are the following:
- HTML documents which are used to describe questions to students.
- JSON files which store data about activities/used to control which students can access/evaluate activities during which time periods
- Shell scripts: are used to compile, run, and evaluate student’s code.

Unfortunately, the creation of these files are time consuming and often filled with errors. CodeLab is a solution that we have created for this. CodeLab was created in order to make the uploading of assignments easy and problem free, in a matter of minutes. This paper will focus on the creation of CodeLab and look at the techniques employed to generate the files required for the automated grading and feedback tool. We will provide feedback from users of the tool along with showcasing the speed with which we can generate the required files compared to the traditional method of generating these files individually. We will showcase the benefits of using such a tool for anybody within the Computer Science programming domain.

Keywords:

Technology, Computer Science, Automated Feedback and Assessment.