Development and usability testing of a web application to streamline the creation of problems packages for BOCA-administered programming competitions

BOCA is a programming contest management system widely used in Brazil. To register a programming problem in BOCA, a problem package consisting of a PDF problem statement and test case files for automated code assessment is required. However, the problem package creation feature in BOCA is rather limited. Therefore, in this paper, we present BOCA Problems Builder — a web application to streamline the creation of problems packages for BOCAadministered competitions. A key feature of the application is an extensive builtin catalog of programming problems sourced from the archives of the OBI and the Programming Marathon. A formative usability testing was conducted to evaluate the application and its results indicated a satisfactory user experience.