Hands-on exercises are often used to improve student engagement and knowledge retention in systems, networking and cybersecurity classes. Even when students comprehend the concepts, they may lack the skills to complete an exercise. Teachers need effective tools to identify these problemsduring an assignment and offer targeted and timely help.

Engaging students in practical, hands-on exercises on testbeds improves student learning and knowledge retention. However, testbeds may also present an obstacle to learning for students who are not familiar with the environment, or who lack the necessary background to complete their assignments. Our research investigates how students learn with testbeds. We instrument a default operating system on the DeterLab testbed and monitor the students' command line input and output, as they perform homework assignments.We use this data to evaluate students' progress, to detect when a student is struggling and to identify common problems.