Elicast: Embedding Interactive Exercises in Instructional Programming Screencasts

Abstract

In programming education, instructors often supplement lectures with active learning experiences by offering programming lab sessions where learners themselves practice writing code. However, widely accessed instructional programming screencasts are not equipped with assessment format that encourages such hands-on programming activities. We introduce Elicast, a screencast tool for recording and viewing programming lectures with embedded programming exercises, to provide hands-on programming experiences in the screencast. In Elicast, instructors embed multiple programming exercises while creating a screencast, and learners engage in the exercises by writing code within the screencast, receiving auto-graded results immediately. We conducted an exploratory study of Elicast with five experienced instructors and 63 undergraduate students. We found that instructors structured the lectures into small learning units using embedded exercises as checkpoints. Also, learners more actively engaged in the screencast lectures, checked their understanding of the content through the embedded exercises, and more frequently modified and executed the code during the lectures.