X-Lab: XML-based laboratory exercises for CS1

Most community colleges and universities offer an Introduction to Computer Programming course in Java. For such courses, the ACM/IEEE Curricula '91 report recommends a co-requisite laboratory experience. While commonly used textbooks typically offer on-line presentation materials for use in lecture, there are few resources supporting the development of the laboratory component. This paper describes a set of freely available web-based laboratory exercises called X-Lab. These exercises are complete, modular, and self-verifying. Our distribution uses XSLT templates to create standardized HTML lab exercise sets from XML documents. The XML implementation provides several advantages, including standardization, customization at installation, and the ability to create simulations using XML tags with no specialized graphical programming.