AutoGrad: Automated Grading Software for Mobile Game Assignments in SuaCode Courses

TL;DR

AutoGrad is a portable, cross-platform automatic grading system designed for Android-based graphical programming assignments, successfully tested across African countries, streamlining assessment and feedback in arts-focused courses.

Contribution

It introduces AutoGrad, the first system for grading graphical Processing programs on Android, expanding automatic grading to arts and African educational contexts.

Findings

AutoGrad effectively grades and provides feedback on student assignments.

It reduces grading time and effort significantly.

AutoGrad is well-received by students and easy to integrate.

Abstract

Automatic grading systems have been in existence since the turn of the half-century. Several systems have been developed in the literature with either static analysis and dynamic analysis or a hybrid of both methodologies for computer science courses. This paper presents AutoGrad, a novel portable cross-platform automatic grading system for graphical Processing programs developed on Android smartphones during an online course. AutoGrad uses Processing, which is used in the emerging Interactive Media Arts, and pioneers grading systems utilized outside the sciences to assist tuition in the Arts. It also represents the first system built and tested in an African context across over thirty-five countries across the continent. This paper first explores the design and implementation of AutoGrad. AutoGrad employs APIs to download the assignments from the course platform, performs static and dynamic analysis on the assignment to evaluate the graphical output of the program, and returns the grade and feedback to the student. It then evaluates AutoGrad by analyzing data collected from the two online cohorts of 1000+ students of our SuaCode smartphone-based course. From the analysis and students' feedback, AutoGrad is shown to be adequate for automatic assessment, feedback provision to students, and easy integration for both cloud and standalone usage by reducing the time and effort required in grading the 4 assignments required to complete the course.