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How much does it cost?
Can professors add their own exercises?
How long does it take students to do the exercises?
How does CodeLab determine correctness?
Do I have to install anything on my network or computer?
Why can't I run the CodeLab server on our local network?
Won't students just plagiarize each other's answers?
How does CodeLab compare with various IDEs for beginners?
How does CodeLab compare with the "knockoffs" (CodeX, XLab, etc.) provided by publishers?
Is CodeLab tied to any particular textbook?
How much does it cost?
Click Here For Pricing
Can professors add their own exercises?
Yes! CodeLab now includes an Instructor Exercise Editor that allows
instructors to add their own full-program exercises (i.e. "Write a
program that..."). The Editor is located under the "NEW" tab of the
Lab section of CodeLab. These instructor exercises will be placed
in the CodeLab table of contents with the other exercises and be
tested for correctness by our system using the instructor-provided
input and output.
How long does it take students to do the exercises?
This, of course has a lot to do with the individual student and the particular
exercise, but we do know that 90% of the exercises are completed in less than
four attempts and that the average number of submissions needed to complete
an exercise completely is 1.5.
How does CodeLab determine correctness?
The instructions of an exercise specify code that changes
the computer's state in a particular way under particular
circumstances. The Turing's Craft engine determines whether
or not the student submission meets this specification.
Correctness is not affected by inelegance or inefficiency.
Do I have to install anything on my network or computer?
There is nothing to install to use CodeLab. All that is needed is an internet connection and a common web browser.
Why can't I run the CodeLab server on our local network?
Three reasons: support, environment, and liability. First, we're very
proud of the support we provide. We carefully monitor logs from all our
users and if an error or anomaly is discovered we rapidly correct the
problem. Local installation precludes that. Also, to make our server do its
"magic", we rely on all sorts of ancillary environmental software that is
difficult to guarantee (and in the right version) locally. Finally there's
liability: obviously security issues are non-trivial here. Add lawyers and
you know the rest.
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Won't students just plagiarize each others answers?
While there may be some plagiarism
going on in CodeLab exercises, we believe it tends to
be minimal for the following reasons:
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CodeLab exercises tend to be easy for students to do.
We go to great lengths to provide helpful feedback and
hints. Furthermore, CodeLab exercises are small-- that
makes them non-overwhelming. Finally, CodeLab
exercises are "graduated" in complexity. If a student
has done the first N in a batch, N+1 is only slightly
more complex or sophisticated.
Thus, one of the main motivations of cheating (the feeling
that "I can't do this" or even "this will take me forever")
goes away.
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There are so many CodeLab exercises (200+) that cheating
becomes a pain in the neck. It is much more of a bother
to post somewhere 200 separately copied/pasted solutions
than to post 10 major homeworks. Likewise it is more of
bother to copy/paste such solutions in to the exercises.
The net "saving" just isn't there.
We could use tools that compare submissions, but that
would be futile for many problems where most submissions would
ordinarily be some minor variation of an "obvious" solution.
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How does CodeLab compare with the various IDEs for beginners?
CodeLab is a collection of short focused, programming exercises that are
automatically evaluated for correctness and return helpful feedback on errors.
These capabilities and the benefits that come from them are not present in
any other product. CodeLab is not an environment for writing and compiling
full programs from scratch. There are many IDEs available that offer features to
make it simpler to begin writing programs, but CodeLab remains the the simplest way
for students to start writing real programming code and know instantly whether they
are doing it right. In the end, CodeLab is complementary to these development environments
and for beginners the combination of CodeLab and a learning IDE would be very beneficial.
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How does CodeLab compare with the "knockoffs" (CodeX, XLab, etc.) provided by publishers?
Publishers are in the business of selling books. The knockoffs provided by some publishers "for free"
are an attempt to kill used-book sales and support the current stratospheric level of textbook
pricing. This goes hand in hand with the strategy of frequent new editions with marginal improvements.
These knockoffs represent a minimum investment on the publisher's part. At best they provide a web-accessible
compiler/minimal IDE with sample code from the book for the student to play with. They do not catch logical
errors at all (so of course they can't give feedback on those) and even the feedback and hints they provide
for compiler errors are generic, and not specific to student submission.
CodeLab, on the other hand was developed by faculty for the specific purpose of helping our students. It
became a commercial product as part of an NSF-suggested strategy for dissemination. The purpose of
CodeLab is helping students learn-- its commercial nature is a vehicle to make that possible. The purpose
of the knockoffs is to kill the used-book market.
Comparison? There's no comparison.
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Is CodeLab tied to any particular textbook?
CodeLab is textbook-independent: it is a great self-paced lab
that complements any introductory programming text.
The topics covered by CodeLab are found in most introductory Computer Science
textbooks that focus on the fundamentals of programming.
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