Taking benefit from fellow students code without copying off -- making better use of students collective work

Abstract

We report about research in progress that aims at generating additional value for programming novices from the collective work of all students in this (and earlier) term(s). We propose live progress reports about the whole course to better estimate the own capabilities. And we propose a solution that autonomously creates hints from other students’ solutions to support novices in situations where they do not know how to proceed. A plugin integrates the tool seamlessly in the IDE to avoid additional technical burden. We report first results on a small test group.