Practical programming competencies are critical to the success in computer science education and go-to-market of fresh graduates. Acquiring the required level of skills is a long journey of discovery, trial and error, and optimization seeking through a broad range of programming activities that learners must perform themselves. It is not reasonable to consider that teachers could evaluate all attempts that the average learner should develop multiplied by the number of students enrolled in a course, much less in a timely, deeply, and fairly fashion. Unsurprisingly, exploring the formal structure of programs to automate the assessment of certain features has long been a hot topic among CS education practitioners. Assessing a program is considerably more complex than asserting its functional correctness, as the proliferation of tools and techniques in the literature over the past decades indicates. Program efficiency, behavior, readability, among many other features, assessed either statically or dynamically, are now also relevant for automatic evaluation. The outcome of an evaluation evolved from the primordial boolean values to information about errors and tips on how to advance, possibly taking into account similar solutions. This work surveys the state-of-the-art in the automated assessment of CS assignments, focusing on the supported types of exercises, security measures adopted, testing techniques used, type of feedback produced, and the information they offer the teacher to understand and optimize learning. A new era of automated assessment, capitalizing on static analysis techniques and containerization, has been identified. Furthermore, this review presents several other findings from the conducted review, discusses the current challenges of the field, and proposes some future research directions.

The paper introduces Gamified Education Interoperability Language (GEdIL), designed as a means to represent the set of gamification concepts and rules applied to courses and exercises separately from their actual educational content. This way, GEdIL allows not only for an easy yet effective specification of gamification schemes for educational purposes, but also sharing them among instructors and reusing in various courses. GEdIL is published as an open format, independent from any commercial vendor, and supported with dedicated open-source software.

Currently, a Learning Management System (LMS) plays a central role in any e-learning environment. These environments include systems to handle the pedagogic aspects of the teaching-learning process (e.g. specialized tutors, simulation games) and the academic aspects (e.g. academic management systems). Thus, the potential for interoperability is an important, although over looked, aspect of an LMS system. In this paper we make a comparative study of the interoperability level of the most relevant LMS. We start by defining an application and a specification model. For the application model, we create a basic application that act as a tool provider for LMS integration. The specification model act as the API that the LMS should implement to communicate with the tool provider. Based on researches we select the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) from IMS. Finally, we compare the LMS interoperability level defined as the effort made to integrate the application on the study LMS.