Designing an Environment for Annotating and Grading Student Assignments

A number of software tools are available to annotate documents with digital ink. However, they only partly solve the problem of annotating and grading student assignments, this task requires digital annotation capabilities, recognition of digital ink and support for workflow practices. We are particularly interested in marking student programming assignments. Programs differ from essays and reports in that they: often need to be examined non-sequentially, exist in multiple files and are usually compiled and executed as a part of the marking process. In this paper we describe the design process for our initial design of such a paperless environment, describe the design decisions we have made and our first prototype, ‘Penmarked’. We discuss how this work may inform others designing pen-based applications and conclude with future work.