Dodona: Learn to Code with a Virtual Co-teacher that Supports Active Learning

Abstract

Dodona (dodona.ugent.be) is an intelligent tutoring system for learning computer programming, statistics and data science. It bridges the gap between assessment and learning by providing real-time data and feedback to help students learn better, teachers teach better and educational technology become more effective. We show how Dodona can be used as a virtual co-teacher to stimulate active learning and support challenge-based education in open and collaborative learning environments. We also highlight some of the opportunities and challenges we have faced in practice. Dodona is free to use and has more than 50 thousand registered users across many educational and research institutions, including 15 thousand new users in the last year. Dodona's source code is available on GitHub under the permissive MIT open-source license.