Educational programming systems for learning at scale

Abstract

Learning programming at scale underlies computer science education ranging from basic programming to advanced software engineering topics. There are strong needs of providing effective system supports for learning programming at scale. Among various desirable characteristics of such system supports, system supports shall allow students to write programs via an online Integrated Development Environment (IDE), allow students to get feedback on how they perform on the given programming exercises, etc. To aim for such effective system supports for learning programming at scale, research teams from Peking University have developed two systems: POP (denoting Peking University Online Programming System) and POJ (denoting Peking University Online Judge System). These two systems have achieved high impact among students around the world (especially those in China). In this paper, we present the overview of the two systems, along with our ongoing and future work on extending the systems for achieving higher effectiveness in supporting learning programming at scale.