An Exercise Management System for Teaching Programming

An effective learning activity in a computer programming course is to study and practice computer programs. In order to help students to submit exercises and to assist instructors to mark programming exercises, a number of program submissions and assessment systems have been developed. However, these systems do not provide sufficient support for instructors to design exercises that can help students to study and practice computer programs in an incremental manner. With the primary aim to improve the teaching and learning of computer programming, we have developed a programming exercise management system, namely Programming Learning Web (PLWeb), to assist instructors to design computer programming exercises and to help students to study and practice programming exercises. PLWeb provides an integrated development environment (IDE) which is used not only as an authoring tool for instructors to compose exercises but also as a novice-friendly editor for students to study programs and to submit solutions. In addition, PLWeb allows instructors to use visualized learning status to assist students with difficulties. A plagiarism detection tool is also provided to deter students from plagiarism.