To teach students how to program, I have developed a number of tools aimed to shorten the time from delivery to feedback. At its best, it offers students, available any time, immediate rich feedback on their production, so they can deliver their assignments confidently.
This approach offers a number of additional benefits, such as, flexible schedule, unbiased evaluation, sense of fairness (no more score negotiation), improved engagement, more time during class to deal with diversity, clean comparison to perform statistical studies. Students get used to striving for strict fulfillment of requirements while dealing with current real professional tools and techniques.
These tools are integrated in a wider system that includes online contents specially tailored to students needs inspired in the flipped-classroom approach; a fair amount of meaningful (i.e. non abstract) exercises constructed in a way that each exercise includes a new feature while recovering previously worked ones, to help integration; a positive and cheerful approach during class time encouraging participation, collaboration, assertive feedback, respect, professional orientation, and also very important, the idea that solving problems can be enjoyable and even fun.
In the attached article, I will focus on presenting the automation side.
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