Test My Code: An Automatic Assessment Service for the Extreme Apprenticeship Method - 2nd International Workshop on Evidence-Based Technology Enhanced Learning - page 106

Test My Code: An Automatic Assessment
Service for the Extreme Apprenticeship Method

Arto Vihavainen, Matti Luukkainen, and Martin Partel

Abstract. We describe an automated assessment system called Test My Code
(TMC) which is designed to support instructors' and students' work in program-
ming courses that use the Extreme Apprenticeship method. From the students'
point of view TMC is a transparent assessment service that is integrated to a
industry-standard programming environment. TMC allows scaffolding during stu-
dents' working process, retrieves and updates exercises on the fly, and causes no
overhead to the programming process. From the instructors' perspective, TMC al-
lows collaborative crafting of exercises with small goals that combine into bigger
programs, gathering snapshots from students' actual programming process, and col-
lecting feedback. TMC has been successfully used in MOOCs in programming as
well as in our university courses.

1 Introduction

Methods based on Cognitive Apprenticeship (CA) [8] have recently had success in
teaching programming [2, 7]. Extreme Apprenticeship (XA) is an interpretation of
CA that builds a relationship between the teacher and the learner, and emphasizes
scaffolding by providing support from material, exercises and people around the
student [17]. A key success factor in XA is the students' own activity and the amount
of deliberate work put in working on the exercises. In a XA-based course there are
usually lots of small exercises that allow the student to experience success, build
her self-confidence, and hone her programming routine. Small exercises combine
into bigger entities, explicitly showing the working process needed to solve larger
problems. After a student has worked through a problem in steps, she can later solve
similar problems without the step-wise scaffolding.

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