Code hunt: searching for secret code for fun

Abstract

Learning to code can be made more effective and sustainable if it is perceived as fun by the learner. Code Hunt uses puzzles that players have to explore by means of clues presented as test cases. Players iteratively modify their code to match the functional behaviour of secret solutions. This way of learning to code is very different to learning from a specification. It is essentially re-engineering from test cases. Code Hunt is based on the test/clue generation of Pex, a white-box test generation tool that uses dynamic symbolic execution. Pex performs a guided search to determine feasible execution paths. Conceptually, solving a puzzle is the manual process of conducting search-based test generation: the "test data" to be generated by the player is the player's code, and the "fitness values" that reflect the closeness of the player's code to the secret code are the clues (i.e., Pex-generated test cases). This paper is the first one to describe Code Hunt and its extensions over its precursor Pex4Fun. Code Hunt represents a high-impact educational gaming platform that not only internally leverages fitness values to guide test/clue generation but also externally offers fun user experiences where search-based test generation is manually emulated. Because the amount of data is growing all the time, the entire system runs in the cloud on Windows Azure.

Transferring an automated test generation tool to practice

“…The core type of Pex4Fun games is a coding duel [65] where the player has to solve a particular programming problem. Figure 3 shows the workflow of playing an example coding duel in Pex4Fun or Code Hunt [62,64] (evolved from Pex4Fun, with more details in the end of this section). A coding duel created by a game creator (who could be any user of Pex4Fun) consists of two methods with the same method signature and return type 1 .…”

“…button (indicating the attempts made by users to solve games in Pex4Fun) as over 1.5 million till July 2014. Evolved from Pex4Fun, the Code Hunt [62,64] website has been used in a very large programming competition.…”

Lord of Code: Uma Ferramenta de Apoio ao Ensino da Programação

“…A ferramenta criada pela Microsoft é um jogo em que são apresentados trechos de código com erros que precisam ser solucionados para o jogador prosseguir (TILLMANN et al, 2014). Outro exemplo é o da ferramenta CodeWrite que insere questões onde o estudante precisa implementar uma solução em código, segundo seus conhecimentos na linguagem (DENNY et al, 2011).…”

Code Hunt: Experience with Coding Contests at Scale

“…Hints can provide the same assistance as an instructor does during office hours when a student drops by to seek help with a coding issue. Code Hunt already has an initial feature for producing additional hints [15]. Our future work plans to further enhance this feature for maximizing student learning effect.…”

“…In previous work, we discussed the technical challenges of building Code Hunt, as well as its predecessor Pex4Fun [12] [13] [14] [15]. This paper concentrates on the insights that we are acquiring into the behavior of players through controlled play via contests.…”