ProFormA: An XML-based exchange format for programming tasks

Abstract

Support systems for programming education are in widespread use. However common standards for the exchange of general (learning) content and tests do not meet the special requirements of programming tasks, e.g. dealing with complex submissions consisting of multiple files or the combination of different (automatic) evaluation and assessment procedures. Thus, due to missing interoperability, programming tasks cannot be exchanged between systems easily despite the fact that this would be desirable due to the high cost of the development of good tasks. In this paper, an extensible XML-based format for the exchange of programming tasks is presented, which is already used in multiple systems. The XML-format is available on-line [PFMA].