Education Commons^™

From Walls To Steps: Using Online Automatic Homework Checking Tools To Improve Learning In Introductory Programming Courses, Dwayne Towell, Brent Reeves

School of Information Technology and Computing

We describe the motivation, design, and implementation of a web-based automatic homework checker for Programming I and Programming II courses. Motivated by a problem-based-learning approach, we redesigned our first course to have over 70 short programming assignments. The goal was to change conceptual "walls" into "steps", so that students would not feel overwhelmed at any point in time. At each step along the way, it must be clear where the student is and the next step must feel attainable. Over the last 3 years, we have learned much about proper "step-size" and sequencing of problems. We describe how current computer …