Testing Scheme programming assignments automatically

In distance learning missing direct communication between teachers and learners makes it difficult to provide direct assistance to students while they are solving their homework tasks. We address this problem especially for programming tasks and describe a system automatically analyzing students’ homework tasks, and providing understandable feedback. Our approach is adapted to the special situation in distance learning and is integrated into the virtual university approach at the University of Hagen. It consists of a general framework, and instances for individual programming languages. For these instances, one example is presented for the programming language Scheme.