uAssign: Scalable and flexible interactive activities for teaching the UNIX terminal

In this thesis, I describe uAssign, an assignment system for teaching and assessing command line terminal skills. It allows an instructor to create terminal assignments where students complete a sequence of operations to achieve a goal correctly that can be automatically graded. Assignments can be randomized, and are created to an instructor's specification. uAssign provides a friendly user interface to a Docker container via an in-browser terminal emulator powered by WebSockets. Performance testing and its use in an ongoing course show that it is efficient enough to handle a large number of concurrent users. A survey of students shows significant improvement in terminal skill confidence after using uAssign and provides interesting insight into the preferences and opinions of freshman-level students on the subject of their development workflows and terminal experience.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.S.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2018

Author dc:creator

• Bailey, Jacob

Contributors dc:contributor

• Zilles, Craig

• unix
• terminal
• docker
• containers
• teaching
• websockets
• browser
• prairielearn

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2018 Jacob Bailey

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/101068

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/101068