ACE2011
Thirteenth Australasian Computing Education Conference
Workshops
ViLLE Workshop
| Leader: | Mikko Laakso |
|---|---|
| Date: | Monday 17 January, 2011 |
| Time: | 9:00am to 12:30pm |
| Location: | Building 300, Room 218, eastern side of campus near bus station (map) |
ViLLE is a collaborative education platform which makes it possible for teachers to create virtual courses and automatically assessed exercises of different kinds easily. All created material can be utilized, commented and evaluated by other teachers. Moreover, ViLLE automatically gathers data about students' learning behavior and results while they are using the system. This creates new research possibilities, as huge amount of quantitative and qualitative data becomes available.
ViLLE currently supports five types of assignments:
- Visualization assignments combine program visualization with multiple choice and array questions.
- In program code sorting assignments the students are asked to re-arrange rows of a program for it to perform the given task.
- In Coding assignments students writes a program (or part of it) by given specifications.
- Surveys can be used e.g. for exams, pre- and post-course enquiries and for file submissions.
- Quizzes contain multiple choice questions with choice of material (such as program code) attached.
Planned outcomes:
- A ready-to-use course for each participant with automated assessed exercises (scores stored) with immediate feedback and visualizations
- Knowledge of how to use the ViLLE-system
- Student view (registration, how to do an exercise)
- Teacher view (how to create/modify courses, use statistics)
- How to create/share/rank/search exercises/surveys
- How to create/participate in/collaborate in research projects
- Create new research project possibilities
Developing an Exam Taxonomy Workshop
| Leaders: | Angela Carbone, Judy Sheard, Donald Chinn and Mikko Laakso |
|---|---|
| Date: | Monday 17 January, 2011 |
| Time: | 1:30pm to 5:00pm |
| Location: | Building 300, Room 218, eastern side of campus near bus station (map) |
The aim of this workshop is to investigate the nature and composition of programming exam papers. This will provide a better understanding of how and why some assessment instruments (for example, multiple choice questions or open-ended computer programming problems) are better suited for some environments (for example, large classes versus small classes). At the workshop we will review and trial a classification scheme for programming exam papers developed at a Bracelet workshop held after the ICER conference in September 2008. Through our analysis, we hope to provide a common language that computing educators can use to describe their assessment techniques. We may also gain ideas for novel formats for exam questions and may find exam questions that are commonly used and could be shared. Although our work focuses on programming exams we envisage that the classification scheme we develop will be applicable more widely.
At the workshop we expect participants to analyse a set of exam papers. Through an analysis of exam papers we hope to classify these instruments along the following dimensions:
- format of the exam (e.g. number of questions, duration of the exam, online vs. paper exam),
- the kinds of questions on the exam (e.g. style of question, the skills needed to solve the question, topics covered, level of complexity), and
- course demographics (for example, the level of the course, class size, instructional philosophy (e.g. objects first versus objects later)).
Planned outcomes:
- Programming exam question taxonomy
- Ideas for a repository to share exam questions
- A shared understanding of standards and practices in programming assessment.