CodeVisions: Static Code Analysis for Creating Education-Oriented Applications

Simplifying programming for novices and students is a goal for many computer science instructors over the world and an essential concern for computer science education in general. In this paper we introduce CodeVisions, a static code analyzer and interpreter that provides testing and assessment mechanisms and generates a detailed trace of code execution. It's intended to be used to facilitate creating programming tutoring or coding assessing applications (Such as visualizers and auto-graders) through a variety of supported programming languages and flexibility of restricting code inputs. CodeVisions has a testing mechanism that allows users to write their own tests to validate the dump to their rules instead of manually parse the dump themselves resulting a test report too.

Developers and CSE researchers who are interested in creating educational applications like visualizers and auto-graders may find such applications complicated in terms of implementation. These projects require implementing compilers, interpreters, and virtual machines for processing the code snippets that can be student answer or a task which makes further development a big burden to the developer.