Eliph: Effective visualization of code history for peer assessment in programming education

Abstract

Peer assessment is an effective pedagogical tool in which students engage in the process of evaluating other student's work. In programming education, peer assessment involves peer code review, where students mark and give feedback other peer's code. We introduce Eliph, a webbased peer assessment tool for programming education with code history visualization. Eliph incorporates the visualization of character-level code history, selection-based history tracking and the integration of execution events. In a controlled experiment performed in an undergraduate CS course, we found that Eliph helps students understand code structure and the author's intention more clearly, and promotes higher quality of peer feedback.