Abstract:

Software has become indispensable in today's everyday life: Every day, most of the people surf online on their smartphones or laptops, shop in online stores or read news on passenger television on the subway. Accordingly, programming and developing of software and web applications is one of the most frequently requested skills in the present time. According to the German Employment Agency, job vacancies for IT specialists increased by just under 20% between 2015 and 2016. Hence, there has been a continuous increase in enrollment in the computer science department for quite some time. As reported by the German Statistical Office on the basis of current survey results, the number of first year students in the field of computer science in the winter semester 2018/2019 once again has increased by 1% to 39,600 students throughout Germany.

As a result, the number of participants increases in the practical exercises offered in the computer science courses, in which the knowledge gained in the lectures should be applied by practical usage. Due to the high number of participants, the teachers are overloaded because they now have to check a larger number of student assignments at the same time. Even the amount of time that a person has to pay to a trivial task such as checking a correct page link for more than 50 students is enormous. On the other hand, it is of a big importance for the student, that his specially designed solution for a given task is checked for correctness. In order to make progress, correct and regular feedback on the quality and accuracy of the code developed by a student is important for his learning progress.

Therefore, it would be advantageous to develop an application that can automatically review and evaluate the student's solutions and return them a meaningful feedback based on the evaluation result. In this paper, an approach for an automatic check of students work in web technologies will be presented.

This learning environment contains several theoretical parts in the area of web technologies, mainly the technologies HTML and CSS. For each topic, the theoretical part describes some more in-depth information about it. Each topic includes one or more exercises too. Each of them is broken down into some smaller task steps. For every single step of an exercise, some individual test cases are provided in the learning environment. As soon as the student finishes the exercises, his solution is tested automatically using these test cases.

Hence, a student can enter his code in the application and he immediately sees the evaluation of his HTML or CSS code. In addition, he can save his code for a further use.

In this paper, the following aspects of the new learning environment will be presented:
1. The learning environment itself,
2. The didactic aspects for the organization of a course using this environment,
3. The first evaluation results after a prototypical use of the learning environment during the last semester

Keywords:

Self-learning, web technologies, automatic tests.