Quizly: A live coding assessment platform for App Inventor

There is a strong worldwide movement which is pushing for the teaching of serious computer science principles besides reading, writing and basic numeracy starting from first grade and reaching all students across all grades. This is being done through both formal initiatives carried out by international organizations and at the national level by putting forward curricula, some of which are mandatory. In order to accomplish this goal, and based on the consensus that computer science is not programming and that programming languages are a tool, visual languages have become the preferred method for teaching introductory courses in computer science. The absence of rigid syntactic rules makes them the ideal tool for focusing on problem solving and computational thinking activities. Recent reports have pointed out the need for supporting the international community of teachers by providing assessment methods, an internationally validated question repository as well as tools and assessment platforms. In this context our work presents an assessment platform for formative, summative and informal assessment of computer science competencies by using a visual language, namely App Inventor, which allows for the rapid development of a mobile app and has a strong appeal to the younger generation of students. The capability to log user activity allows the teacher to monitor the progression in the student´s learning path as well as her/his solution-building approach.