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World Conference on Information Systems and Technologies

WorldCIST 2020: Trends and Innovations in Information Systems and Technologies pp 45–55Cite as

Building a Virtualized Environment for Programming Courses

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Part of the Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing book series (AISC,volume 1160)

Abstract

Despite computer programming courses today often having hundreds of participants, it is important that the students complete practical programming exercises and have a possibility to participate in hands-on programming sessions, where they can get help from their peers and teaching assistants. However, heterogeneous devices used by students pose a great challenge. When installing and using development tools, both platform specific issues and the limitations of students’ personal skill cause issues and lots of extra work for teachers. To address these challenges, we built a virtualized environment that provides the same homogeneous environment for all the students, reducing the time used for configuration and assisting students and allowing time to be used teaching the actual contents of the course. The current study provides an experience report on our course virtualization project, highlighting the drawbacks and benefits of our solution. Our preliminary findings indicate that vast majority of students are using the environment and have found it an effective and usable way to complete the practical coursework.

Keywords

  • Virtualization
  • Programming courses
  • CS education

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  • DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-45691-7_5
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Fig. 1.

Notes

  1. 1.

    Massive Open Online Course.

  2. 2.

    https://www.eclipse.org/.

  3. 3.

    https://code.visualstudio.com/.

  4. 4.

    https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/armhf/apbs02.en.html.

  5. 5.

    https://packages.debian.org/buster/virtinst.

  6. 6.

    https://www.qemu.org/.

  7. 7.

    https://packages.debian.org/buster/debootstrap.

  8. 8.

    https://www.geekbench.com/index.html.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Turku, Turku, Finland

    Tuisku Polvinen, Timo Ylikännö, Ari Mäkeläinen, Sampsa Rauti, Jari-Matti Mäkelä & Jani Tammi

Authors
  1. Tuisku Polvinen
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  2. Timo Ylikännö
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  3. Ari Mäkeläinen
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  4. Sampsa Rauti
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  5. Jari-Matti Mäkelä
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  6. Jani Tammi
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sampsa Rauti .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Engenharia Informática, Universidade de Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

    Dr. Álvaro Rocha

  2. College of Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

    Hojjat Adeli

  3. FEUP, Universidade do Porto, Porto, Portugal

    Luís Paulo Reis

  4. DIMES, Università della Calabria, Arcavacata di Rende, Italy

    Sandra Costanzo

  5. Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Montenegro, Podgorica, Montenegro

    Dr. Irena Orovic

  6. Universidade Portucalense, Porto, Portugal

    Prof. Fernando Moreira

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Polvinen, T., Ylikännö, T., Mäkeläinen, A., Rauti, S., Mäkelä, JM., Tammi, J. (2020). Building a Virtualized Environment for Programming Courses. In: Rocha, Á., Adeli, H., Reis, L., Costanzo, S., Orovic, I., Moreira, F. (eds) Trends and Innovations in Information Systems and Technologies. WorldCIST 2020. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1160. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45691-7_5

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