A Systematic Approach to Immediate Verifiable Exercises in Undergraduate Programming Courses

Exercises and solving tasks are an essential part of learning in programming courses. To provide a feedback, discuss problems which occur and eliminate their causes, tasks must be corrected promptly and efficiently. Our experiences and studies have shown that tasks in programming courses are often one-sided, too complex and insufficient. When examining typical tasks we recognized that they can be distinguished in several main categories, such as multiple-choice-tasks, value-tasks, specification-tasks. We further discovered that the task categories differ significantly in the effort required for editing and verification. Categorizing tasks opened new perspectives and forced us to develop a new training environment to be able to handle tasks from different views