Mining an Online Judge System to Support Introductory Computer Programming Teaching

Computer programming is an activity which requires a set of cognitive processes that naturally develop through practice, writing algorithmic solutions. Students learn a lot from their mistakes, but for this they need feedback on their workouts. Marking students’ work outs is very time consuming, which often limits a teacher’s capacity to offer close guidance individually. The PROBOCA project aims to build a tool, based on the BOCA online judge, suited for the purpose of learning computer programming by practice. In addition to a problem database organized by theme and difficulty, the system provides functionalities to support the teacher in the classroom. One of the main endeavors is to develop a procedure for estimating the degree of difficulty of a certain problem. This “nominal” parameter may then be compared to the difficulty level as perceived by each student. The result is a valuable indicator of those students that are experiencing challenges. This paper presents the preliminary specification of PROBOCA ́s architecture and functional requirements along with its current state of development.