Online judges are tools that can significantly help the learning of programming. However, previous studies have found that existing tools provide little level of satisfaction of the teachers' and students' needs. One of these requirements is the learning of concurrent and distributed programming, despite the increasing importance of these computing paradigms. This article reports the implementation of an online judge prototype for concurrent programming and its evaluation through a quasi-experiment. Although no significant differences were found with respect to the traditional tools used in the course, indications were obtained that the students who used the online judge prototype produced solutions with fewer programming anomalies. Regarding motivational aspects, students reported a better user experience, especially those who were able to contrast the online judge against the traditional development tools used in the course.

Pseudocode is a valuable resource used in programming education, software development, and scientific reports for designing algorithmic solutions as it is easy to write, understand, and modify. Since pseudocode is lacking in its ability to be tested, it is difficult to determine whether a pseudocode solution is correct or not. Software tools are specially required to reach this goal, e.g., helping professors find race conditions, deadlocks, or starvation issues while grading students’ concurrent pseudocode. Although there are various tools to work with sequential pseudocode, there is a lack of tools to work with concurrent pseudocode. This shortage motivated us to determine the state-of-the-art in notations and tools for testing concurrent and distributed pseudocode. We conducted a systematic literature review and found only a few related publications, confirming that this topic is understudied. We found and report about five software tools capable of interpreting concurrent or distributed pseudocode, and two software tools capable of verifying its correctness. As another result, no other literature review was found about this topic, conferring novelty to the contributions of this work.

Online programming judges are considered useful and sometimes indispensable tools to support competitive programming, professionals' recruiting, and programming education. In this last field, the scientific literature on these tools focuses on the learners' needs, but neglects the requirements of the professors, even though they are who mainly decide whether or not an educational tool is adopted in the courses they teach. This article collected 132 functional requirements for educative online judges, from the scientific literature and programming teachers with experience in the use of this type of tool. To know the degree of support, the requirements were grouped into 27 categories, and a requirements verification was performed with four available educative online judges reported in a recent systematic literature review. A low degree of satisfaction of requirements was found. This result encourages future research to create tools that better support teaching-learning processes and the requirements collected are a useful contribution as a starting point for such research.

In order to learn a programming language, a correct understanding of its notional machine is mandatory. Students acquire that comprehension mainly through visual and verbal explanations provided by professors, books, videos, and other instructional materials. This research applied the conceptual contraposition technique and program memory tracing technique to the prevalent teaching method in our country: the lecture. The understanding of the C++ notional machine was evaluated on students of a Programming II (CS2) course that implemented the mentioned methods. Results revealed that these techniques applied to the lecture are insufficient to help students develop satisfactory mental models of the C++ notional machine.