Thursday, February 2, 2012

CloudCoder, a web-based programming exercise system

Well, I haven't updated my blog in a really long time, so here goes...

Jaime Spacco and I have been working on a web-based programming exercise system called CloudCoder.  We've finally reached the point where it's ready for students to use.  I wrote up a web page that explains the basic idea (for students in the CS 101 course at York College):
http://faculty.ycp.edu/~dhovemey/spring2012/cs101/cloudCoder.html
I'm planning to use CloudCoder to assign exercises to accompany each reading assignment.  The idea is to give students a concrete way to test their own understanding of the material.  I'm also hoping that if students try a problem, and have trouble with it, they will use the opportunity to attend office hours or a tutoring session.  We'll see how it works out.

We made CloudCoder available under an open source license (AGPL v3), and the code is on Github:
https://github.com/daveho/CloudCoder
There are definitely some rough edges, but it is usable.  If you want to know more, you can drop me a line.