Formative vs. Summative Assessment of Practical Programming Tasks: Do We Need to Investigate?

This pilot study investigates student attitude towards practical coding tasks/exercises assigned during an introductory Python module. We report the experiences of 4 students taking part in this course with respect to assessed lab tasks. We found that generally, our participants preferred all practical lab activities to be assessed, however, they felt that most should have a formative capacity rather than a summative capacity. This suggests that further investigation is required into balancing formative and summative practical programming tasks.