A new Testing Framework for C-Programming Exercises and Online-Assessments

Difficulties with learning a programming language are wide spread in engineering education. The use of a single integrated programming environment for coding, debugging, automated testing and online assessment lowers the initial burdens for novice programmers. We have developed the Virtual-C IDE especially for learning and teaching the C programming language with an integrated framework for program visualizations, programming exercises and online assessments. A new enhancement of the IDE is a xUnit like testing framework allowing on the one hand larger sets of small, test-based programming exercises and on the other hand simplifying the development of programming assignments. The integration of the new testing framework in the assessment system gives students a better and direct feedback on their programming achievements and helps to find syntactic and semantic errors in their source code.