CodeOcean - A versatile platform for practical programming excercises in online environments

The paper at hand introduces CodeOcean, a web-based platform to provide practical programming exercises. CodeOcean is designed to be used in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to teach programming to beginners. Its concept and implementation are discussed with regard to tools provided to students and teachers, sandboxed and scalable code execution, scalable assessment, and interoperability. MOOCs bear a tremendous potential for teaching programming to a large and diverse audience. Learning to program, however, is a hands-on effort; watching videos and solving multiple choice tests will not be sufficient. A platform, such as CodeOcean, to work on practical programming exercises and to solve actual programming tasks is required. Due to the massiveness of the courses, teaching teams cannot check, give feedback, or assess the submissions of the participants manually. CodeOcean provides the participants with proper automated feedback in a timely manner and is able to assess the given programming tasks in an automated way.