Welcome to the home of Web-CAT: the Web-based Center for Automated Testing. This web site hosts a production instance of Web-CAT, and also serves as the on-line home for a number of research groups in Virginia Tech's Department of Computer Science.

What is Web-CAT?

Web-CAT is a plug-in-based web application that supports electronic submission and automated grading of programming assignments.

The Web-CAT Grader supports traditional models of automated program grading, but also supports grading of assignments where students do their own testing. It helps encourage test-driven development (also called test-first coding), where students write small unit tests for each piece of code they add. Web-CAT allows a student to submit his or her test cases along with the solution, and grades on test validity and test completeness as well as code correctness.

The Web-CAT Wiki is a collaborative, user-editable wiki on this server that hosts all of the documentation about Web-CAT, a feature list, links to published papers, FAQs, information about our Sourceforge project, and information about how you can contribute.

Research Groups Hosted Here

This web site serves as the on-line home for a number of research projects, most of which maintain separate wikis:

• The Web-CAT Wiki is described above.

• The Computer Science Education Wiki contains information about a wide variety of topics, including:

  • Teaching Software Testing On-line is an NSF-sponsored project to develop reusable on-line learning modules to teach software testing skills across the undergraduate curriculum.

  • Virginia Tech's CS1 Course has recently been redesigned to be aggressively objects-first, using pair programming, test-driven development, labs, and lots of hands-on activities.

  • A JETT Workshop was held at Virginia Tech in 2004 for AP CS teachers in the region, and materials are available through the CS Ed Wiki.

• The Algoviz Wiki is the home for new Virginia Tech research in algorithm and data structure visualizations, particularly those that are useful for undergraduate education.

• The Built-in Test (BIT) Wiki is the home for the BIT research group, which is investigating a number of techniques for providing automatic, built-in self-testing capabilities in software components.

• The Power Electronics Building Blocks Wiki is the home for the PEBB research group, which is investigating embedded software control problems for modularly constructed power electronics systems. This group collaborates with the Center for Power Electronics Systems, a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center.

You can also find out more about wikis, which are collaborative web sites where users can edit site pages and contribute new pages themselves.

Sponsorship

We gratefully acknowledge the support provided to this work by our sponsors. Web-CAT is supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DUE-0127225, as well as by Virginia Tech's Institute for Distance and Distributed Learning. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or IDDL.