Teaching tools

  

 

Over the years, while teaching programming at the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Organization and Informatics in Varaždin, Croatia, we have faced some problems inherent in the teaching itself as well as those specific for learning programming. From this reason, we have made some software tools to help our students in achieving programming skills.

Verificator

 

Verificator is our software tool aimed at helping students to more easily acquire programming skills, and improving the process of teaching programming at the university beginners’ level. We started from our teaching experiences in building of C++ learning programming inteface, later named as Verificator. Students often tend to adopt some bad programming habits in their attempt to pass the exam. There were cases in which students would learn big fragments of program code by rote, without any or with hardly any understanding. There were also students who wrote large program code without any syntax and logical testing, which produced a huge number of errors, discouraging the students from programming altogether. Verificator works together with DevC++ IDE.

 

More about the concept: here (pdf)

 

 

Installation:

 

• install DevC++ at the default folder (C:\Dev-Cpp; use stable version 4)
• download Verificator (actual english version: 3.14) and extract it in any free folder (must not to be write protected)
• read short_instructions.txt

Videos about Verificator are available at YouTube video channel (laboratory4gpml).

 

Generators used in teaching

   

 

On-line generators written in Python:

Automatic On-line Generation of Student's Exercises (C++ source code + questions) in Teaching Programming:

• Student's entry

• Teacher's entry
   

Our references about teaching tools

 

5. Orehovački, T., Radošević, D., Konecki, M.:"Acceptance of Verificator by Information Science Students", 34th International Conference on Information Technology Interfaces (ITI 2012), Cavtat, 25.-28. June 2012.

4. Radošević, D., Orehovački:"An Analysis of Novice Compilation Behavior using Verificator", 33th International Conference on Information Technology Interfaces (ITI 2011), Cavtat, 27.-30. June 2011.

3. Đanić, M., Radošević, D., Orehovački, T.:"Evaluation of Student Programming Assignments in Online Environments", Central European Conference on Information and Intelligent Systems (Ceciis 2011), Varaždin, 21.-23.09.2011.

2. Radošević, D., Orehovački, T., Stapić, Z.:"Automatic On-line Generation of Student´s Exercises in Teaching Programming", Central European Conference on Information and Intelligent Systems, CECIIS 2010, Varaždin, 22-24 September 2010.

1. Radošević, D., Orehovački, T., Lovrenčić, A:"Verificator: Educational Tool for Learning Programming", Informatics in Education, Vol. 8, No. 2, pg. 261-280, ISSN 1648-5831, Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, Vilnius, Lithuania, 2009.