Hi all
Here's an opportunity for everybody involved in teaching programming. Please forward this to your colleagues too.
Date: 30 September 2024
To: The staff of all the institutions under the UGC and the LEARN members
Subject: Develop programming assignments with automated grading, a collaborative course
The book "Programmieren lernen"[1] (Learn to program) contains a large collection of programming exercises for the novice. Its co-author and the sole copyright owner Dr. Philipp Freimann of Switzerland gave us his explicit permission to use the book and its companion website "programmieraufgaben.ch"[2] (Programming assignments) in our EduNET@LEARN collaboration. We are delighted to offer you an adaptation of the book to the Moodle LMS making use of its powerful quiz tool and its specialized question types which support automated grading of programming assignments[3], [4].
The authors of the book believe that introduction to programming could and should be taught independently of a programming language and through many exercises. They encourage the learners to write the solutions initially in pseudocode[5] and then transfer the solutions to whatever the programming language they use. In this adaptation we support C, Java, Pascal and Python.
Goals and objectives
- Convert the questions in the book to automated grading assignments which you may take home to be used in your own teaching.
- Learn how to convert your programming tasks in automated grading question types in Moodle thereby reducing the burden of correcting.
How the collaboration works
The course contains all the tasks in the book translated into English. You may pick tasks that interest you and solve them. Then we will convert them together to automated correcting quiz assignments.
During the course our teaching assistants will help you with the conversion which you may take home under an open license. We use the Creative Commons CC-BY license[6].
Note that the book is meant for college education and vocational training in Central Europe. Which means that the tasks are not meant for degree level courses. But they are highly suitable for the foundational and "on-boarding" courses for the new entrants.
How to take part
Register yourself on the EduNET@LEARN site[7]. Fill the form and submit. Please use your institution e-mail. We confirm your registration within a working day. If you already have an account go directly to the course[8].
The course is fully on-line. There are no synchronous sessions. Our teaching assistants will be available for person-to-person meetings at announced time slots on demand.
Duration
The course is already on-line and open-ended. Our teaching assistants, who are students from the Open University assigned by LEARN, are available till the end of March 2025.
References
[1] Philipp Freimann, Martin Guggisberg: Programmieren lernen. Orell Füssli Verlag. 184 pages, ISBN: 978-3-280-04066-9. (German) Out of print. PDF at https://www.programmieraufgaben.ch/uploads/endversion.pdf
[2] Companion website https://programmieraufgaben.ch/ (German)
[3] Virtual Programming Lab (VPL) https://vpl.dis.ulpgc.es/
[4] CodeRunner question type https://coderunner.org.nz/
[5] Pseudocode, "a description of the steps in an algorithm using a mix of conventions of programming [..] with informal, usually self-explanatory, notation of actions and conditions." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudocode
[6] Creative Commons CC-BY https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
[7] EduNET.LK@LEARN https://edunet.learn.ac.lk/login/signup.php
[8] Dev-prog-assign course https://edunet.learn.ac.lk/course/view.php?id=718