Usability of an Online Judge for Concurrent Programming Education

Online judges are useful tools for teaching and learning computer programming. Although born in this context, most online judges have been designed to meet the needs of competitive programming rather than programming education. This paper presents a user interface design for an online judge enriched with features of a learning management system (LMS) to satisfy the requirements of teachers and students of concurrent programming identified in a previous study. A wireframe prototype of the proposed interface was built, and its usability was evaluated with students who already had experience using other online judges. The participants managed to complete the eight tasks proposed with the prototype, so it is considered productive. They also reported a high degree of satisfaction when using it and provided suggestions for improvement to enrich the final product according to the user-centered interaction design methodology.