Simon Sprankel

Interaction Add-on of an Animation System and Connection to a Lms: How to Create Exercises Which Can Be Evaluated Automatically Simon Sprankel

Today, lecturers of introductory courses have to create and evaluate exercises for an enormous number of students. Although they usually receive help from teaching assistants, the effort for evaluating the exercises is huge. This thesis proposes a solution at least for lecturers of algorithm and data structure courses. But the solution may also be useful for courses which cover different topics. The idea is that the lecturer creates an exercise with the help of an algorithm visualisation system only once and all the evaluation is done automatically. Hence, the solution scales perfectly with a growing number of students. In order to create the exercises, the algorithm visualisation system Animal is used. Interactions and especially questions can already be included in animations created by Animal. However, the interaction support of Animal is refactored and mostly rewritten in this thesis, so that it can be extended more easily. In order to automate the whole exercise process, a connection to the learning management system (LMS) Moodle is also developed. In the end, lecturers only have to create an Animal animation and a Moodle assignment?the rest will work automatically: The user starts the animation from within Moodle, answers the questions, closes the animation and the results are stored in Moodle in no time.