Enhancing a Theory-Focused Course Through the Introduction of Automatically Assessed Programming Exercises - Lessons Learned

In this paper, we describe our lessons learned during the introduction of automatically assessed programming exercises to a Bachelor’s level course on algorithms and data structures in the Winter semester 2019/2020, which is yearly taken by around 300 students. The course used to mostly focus on theoretical and formal aspects of selected algorithms and data structures. While still maintaining the primary focus of a theoretical computer science course, we introduce a secondary objective of enhancing programming competence by giving practical programming exercises based on select topics from the course. With these assignments, the students should improve their understanding of the theoretical aspects as well as their programming skills. The programming assignments were given in regular intervals during lecture period with a thematic alignment between assignments and lectures. To compensate for the new set of tasks, the workload of assignments on theoretical aspect was reduced. We describe the different experiences and lessons learned through the introduction and conduction of these exercises. A user study with 44 participants shows that the introduction was perceived well by the students, although improvements are still possible, especially in the area of feedback to the students.