extended-abstract

Checking Conformance to a Subset of the Python Language

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Michel WermelingerAuthors Info & Claims

ITiCSE 2023: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 2

Pages 573 - 574

https://doi.org/10.1145/3587103.3594155

Published: 29 June 2023 Publication History

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Abstract

Introductory courses usually only teach a small subset of a programming language and its library, in order to focus on the general concepts rather than overwhelm students with the syntactic, semantic and API minutiae of a particular language.

This paper presents courseware that checks if a program only uses the subset of the Python language and library defined by the instructor. This allows to automatically check that programming examples, exercises and assessments only use the taught constructs. It also helps detect student code with advanced constructs, possibly copied from Q&A sites or generated by large language models.

The tool is easy to install, configure and use. It also checks Python code in Jupyter notebooks, a popular format for interactive textbooks and assessment handouts.

References

[1]

Simon, Raina Mason, Tom Crick, James H. Davenport, and Ellen Murphy. 2018. Language Choice in Introductory Programming Courses at Australasian and UK Universities. In Proc. 49th Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. ACM, 852--857. https://doi.org/10.1145/3159450.3159547

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[2]

Michel Wermelinger. 2023. Using GitHub Copilot to Solve Simple Programming Problems. In Proc. 54th Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, Vol. 1. ACM, 172--178. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3545945.3569830

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Checking Conformance to a Subset of the Python Language

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Published In

ITiCSE 2023: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 2

June 2023

694 pages

ISBN:9798400701399

DOI:10.1145/3587103

General Chairs:
Mikko-Jussi Laakso
University of Turku, Finland
,
Mattia Monga
University of Milan, Italy
,
Program Chairs:
Simon
Unaffiliated, Australia
,
Judithe Sheard
Monash University, Australia

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all 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 third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 29 June 2023

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ITiCSE 2023

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SIGCSE

ITiCSE 2023: Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education

July 7 - 12, 2023

Turku, Finland

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Overall Acceptance Rate 552 of 1,613 submissions, 34%

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