UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE
             COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM

                            presents

            "The Potential of Code Versioning Practices for
                   the Teaching of Programming"

                 Steve Bennett and Pam Green
          (Computer Science, University of Hertfordshire, UK)

                    30 March 2011  (Wednesday)
                      Meeting Room LD454

                  Hatfield, College Lane Campus
                            1 -2  pm

                  Everyone is Welcome to Attend

                  Refreshments will be available

Abstract:


The of Subversion-based code versioning was piloted on 2 Masters' Courses
teaching Web Programming in Semester A. The purpose was primarily to
deter plagiarism and "contract cheating". Access to the code repositories
allowed staff both to monitor the development and to analyze the content
of the students' projects, making inappropriate use of third party code
more apparent.

Throughout the module we provided feedback to the students in the form of
weekly league tables, charting project development in terms of original
code. This proved to be highly motivational and generated a level of
participation in the course not previously experienced.  At the end of
the course the projects and their logs were examined in more depth to
discover whether coding style or steady development were related to the
students' final results.

We explored new ways of analyzing output from the UH copy-detection tool,
Ferret, to discover patterns of influence between participants on the
course and to display these patterns.  We were also interested in early
indications that students might struggle later in the module, so that
timely help could be offered to students showing similar patterns on
future modules.

In this talk we will explain (a) the effects and advantages/disadvantages
of using Subversion in the module and (b) the techniques used to analyze
the code and our findings.




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Hertfordshire Computer Science Research Colloquium
http://homepages.stca.herts.ac.uk/~nehaniv/colloq