An environment for self-assessing Java programming skills in first programming courses

In this paper we propose a new environment for allowing students of a first programming undergraduate course to test their Java code. This environment allows the student to learn the basics of the Java language without necessarily knowing the object-oriented features of the language itself, and the teacher to propose new tests by making use of a graphical test editor. Moreover, the client-server architecture of the Web-based version of the environment is designed so that the student does not even need a Java virtual machine on its computing device, but only a Web browser. This latter feature makes our environment a useful tool for ubiquitous testing of Java programming skills.