A Teacher's Experience with Virtual Programming Lab

Here I present the experiences gained from the development and deployment of auto-graded Virtual Programming Lab (VPL) exercises for flipped class exercises in an introductory class on object-oriented programming for engineering students. Augmenting the VPL system with a unit testing framework like Java’s jUnit allows for rapid development of assessments in a manner that is consistent with engineering approaches to software development, including allowing convenient application of battery of test conditions. The integration of this assessment tool with the institutions learning management system allows for a consistent, automated, and reliable link between the assessment tool and the student grade records. Furthermore, the automated nature of these assessments, and the close ties to the learning management system make this particularly well suited to generating learning outcome and graduate attribute data at a fine level of granularity for program audits such as those carried out by the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board.