Overview

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The Environment for Learning to Program (ELP) is an interactive web-based environment for teaching programming to Information Technology students at Queensland University of Technology. ELP allows students to undertake programming exercises by "filling in the blanks" of a partial program. The system compiles the completed program and returns the resulting, executable file to students if successful, otherwise helpful messages concerning compilation errors are returned.

ELP is an online, active, collaborative and constructive Environment for Learning to Program designed to help students to program successfully at an early stage in their learning. The initial project was motivated by high failure rates amongst beginning programming students. ELP addresses three of QUT's teaching and learning priority areas. Firstly, it is available by flexible delivery - the environment is on the web. Secondly, it can provide timely formative assessment by presenting students with fine-grained online exercises and answers. Thirdly, the environment supports the teaching of generic capabilities of problem solving, time management and working collaboratively.

ELP includes a feedback mechanism which allows a student to annotate an ELP exercise in the form of creating a query in order to specify the problem, then to receive feedback from a tutor. This query may be attached to the exercise as a whole, or may be more specific relating to a single exercise file, or even just a gap. Tutors are then able to retrieve a student's saved exercise together with its annotations and provide feedback as necessary on both the student's code and their queries.

Also included in ELP is a navigation system which allows users to quickly identify and access exercise components via a tree-view: an exercise node can expand to reveal files, and files can expand to reveal gaps. Clicking on any node in the tree takes the user directly to that part of the exercise.

The tree-view also has a fundamental role pertaining to the administration of annotations. When an annotation has been added to an exercise component, a symbol appears in the tree-view next to the node for that annotated component, and users are able to determine from the symbol's appearance whether annotations are new and requiring attention, as well as who wrote them. The annotations themselves appear in their own component of the GUI in chronological order, with colour-coded text depicting the author.

View the User Documentation for ELP.