Abstract:

The Faculty of Informatics of the University of Debrecen has several development projects the goal of which is to support the learning process of students who are studying programming-related subjects. Our applications support the evaluation of differed kinds of programming exercises with a real-time online evaluation mechanism.

Our first and best-known application is the ProgCont system, which provides the technical background for the locally organized programming contest since 2011, and we organize the exams of programming-related courses on its surface since 2014, as well. The problem sets of the web application consists of programming exercises including their descriptions and test cases. Users can submit their solutions for any problem that is currently available. The system first compiles the source code and then tests the program with several test cases. Due to this, we can determine whether the solution can be accepted or rejected. We can find several similar web applications on the Internet, since their logic and the style of their problems are based on the rules of the largest programming contest called ACM-ICPC.

In 2017, we launched several projects as part of the new architecture that is supposed to retire the classic ProgCont application. Our goal is to provide access to the evaluation mechanism to all developers who are interested in developing new applications based on that service. The current web application is being replaced by a new service that is available for anyone who wants to develop new applications— applications that support more comfortably the execution of exams and programming contests as well as applications that can support practicing and secondary school activities.

We developed an architecture that offers flexible services and helps the implementation of new approaches. The sensitive data that is used by these applications can be stored locally. Thus, the personal data of instructors, teachers, and students can be managed by their institution, which can be a good practice according to the GDPR. The applications can access the descriptions and data sets from our public repository, which contains over 1300 entries nowadays, and anyone can also host an own private repository. Institutions can use their self-developed applications as well as the local copies of our sample applications.

In parallel, we started to develop an application that provides evaluation services for students who are studying database courses. The application was first introduced in 2017 to support our laboratory tests and the home practicing of our students. Currently, we are developing a new version with the same architecture as the redesigned ProgCont system and with the same service layers.

First, we introduce the concept of our development and the advantages of our architecture. After that, we present our services and applications already in use as well as our plans for the future.

Keywords:

Online evaluation, programming contests, programming exams, programming courses, database courses, development.