Towards the Assessment of Basic Computational Thinking Skills Using Syntactic Analysis Techniques

This article introduces an exploratory method for automatically grading programming exam questions using syntactic analysis. The target problem is the lack of a robust, scalable, and automated method to analyze computational thinking skills from source code written by elementary school students. The proposed method uses a variety of techniques to assess student responses, including analyzing the programming structure, programming correctness, and code execution based on certain parameters defined during the exercise specification. Analysis of the source code and evaluation of the answers to the exercises are carried out using high performance computing to improve the response time of the system. This preliminary work will contribute to a robust method for automated exam scoring, which is expected to assess and support the development of computational thinking among students.