Pex4Fun: A web-based environment for educational gaming via automated test generation

Abstract

Pex4Fun (http://www.pex4fun.com/) is a web-based educational gaming environment for teaching and learning programming and software engineering. Pex4Fun can be used to teach and learn programming and software engineering at many levels, from high school all the way through graduate courses. With Pex4Fun, a student edits code in any browser -with Intellisense -and Pex4Fun executes it and analyzes it in the cloud. Pex4Fun connects teachers, curriculum authors, and students in a unique social experience, tracking and streaming progress updates in real time. In particular, Pex4Fun finds interesting and unexpected input values (with Pex, an advanced test-generation tool) that help students understand what their code is actually doing. The real fun starts with coding duels where a student writes code to implement a teacher's secret specification (in the form of sample-solution code not visible to the student). Pex4Fun finds any discrepancies in behavior between the student's code and the secret specification. Such discrepancies are given as feedback to the student to guide how to fix the student's code to match the behavior of the secret specification.This tool demonstration shows how Pex4Fun can be used in teaching and learning, such as solving coding duels, exploring course materials in feature courses, creating and teaching a course, creating and publishing coding duels, and learning advanced topics behind Pex4Fun.

Experiences on teaching alloy with an automated assessment platform

“…Again, such feature would also be useful for research, and was one of the reasons that led Microsoft to develop the www.rise4fun.com web service, that allows researchers to easily deploy their tools on the web and collect human-tool interactions for posterior mining [1] (besides other advantages of web tools, like increased exposure, since the need for downloading and installing is eliminated, and promoting reliability given the large amount of test cases that can be collected). One of the most popular examples available via Rise4Fun, and the inspiration for developing Alloy4Fun, is www.pex4fun.com, a web-based educational gaming environment for learning programming, where students can engage in coding duels where they attempt to write code equivalent to a tutor's secret implementation [12]. Pex [11], an advanced white box test-generation tool, is used on the background to find inputs that show discrepancies between the student's code and the secret implementation.…”

Sharing and Learning Alloy on the Web

“…Again, such feature would also be useful in a research context, and was one of the reasons that led Microsoft to develop the www.rise4fun.com web service, that allows researchers to easily deploy their tools on the web and collect humantool interactions for posterior mining [1] (besides other advantages of web tools, like increased exposure, since the need for downloading and installing is eliminated, and promoting reliability given the large amount of test cases that can be collected for free). One of the most popular examples available via Rise4Fun, and the inspiration for developing Alloy4Fun, is www.pex4fun.com, a web-based educational gaming environment for learning programming, where students can engage in coding duels where they attempt to write code equivalent to a teacher's secret implementation [7]. Pex [8], an advanced white box test-generation tool, is used on the background to find inputs that show discrepancies between the student's code and the secret implementation.…”