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Open ended programming environments provide a wonderful low threshold, high ceiling, and wide walls. However, many lack autograding capabilities. This is a missed opportunity as autograding could make them more conducive to usage in MOOCs such as Coursera as well as make curriculum easier to adopt. Furthermore, if users were able to easily create and distribute their own autograders, this could empower them to share and remix curriculum more easily - potentially even creating them from a curated collection of (autograded) exercises!

To this end, we have recently added support for building your own autograder for NetsBlox in NetsBlox. With these autograders, users can navigate the available exercises from within NetsBlox, start them, and get immediate feedback about their code! They also can load starter projects and descriptions making them great for assignments like Parson’s problems. Integration with Coursera is supported which enables users to submit their assignments without leaving NetsBlox (or having to create a custom extension!).

In this workshop, we will be building our own custom autograders composed of a set of exercises which could be used in a course and shared with other educators! We will start with a short introduction to NetsBlox and a hands-on introduction to autograders. Attendees will then create a simple autograder using exercises from an existing set of public NetsBlox exercises. Next, we will explore creating custom exercises from within NetsBlox including the test cases used for assessment. Attendees will then extend their autograder with additional exercises that they have created themselves! Finally, we will conclude with some additional resources as well as thoughts and feedback from the attendees.

Relevant Links: - Slides are available at https://speakerdeck.com/brollb/building-your-own-autograder-in-netsblox - https://github.com/netsblox/exercises - https://editor.netsblox.org/?extensions=["https://editor.netsblox.org/services/routes/autograders/brian/NetsBlox Exercises.js"]