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EASy-DSBuilder: automated assessment of tree data structures in computer science teaching

Published: 13 April 2015 Publication History

Abstract

This paper presents EASy-DSBuilder, an e-assessment tool for assessing fundamental concepts of binary tree data structure operations (i.e. search, insert, and delete operations) taught in Computer Science (CS) lectures. Students can manipulate data structures by adding nodes and freely move them, as well as connect and disconnect nodes within a drag-and-drop interface. At the same time, teachers can easily create new exercises based on their own data structures by uploading their Java implementation. We discuss EASy-DSBuilder's user interface and its general feedback mechanism. We also conducted a user study evaluating EASy-DSBuilder's user interface, visualisation techniques, and overall performance. Both qualitative and quantitative results show that usability is well-liked and learning success is promising.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SAC '15: Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
April 2015
2418 pages
ISBN:9781450331968
DOI:10.1145/2695664
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 13 April 2015

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Author Tags

  1. algorithms
  2. automatic assessment
  3. binary trees
  4. data structures
  5. e-assessment
  6. immediate feedback
  7. online learning
  8. visual algorithm simulation

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  • Research-article

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SAC 2015
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SAC 2015: Symposium on Applied Computing
April 13 - 17, 2015
Salamanca, Spain

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SAC '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 291 of 1,211 submissions, 24%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,650 of 6,669 submissions, 25%

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SAC '25
The 40th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing
March 31 - April 4, 2025
Catania , Italy

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