University of California — Berkeley

Codio lets students at UC Berkeley work on complex programming projects from day one without complex technical configuration requirements.

case studies logos (4)
01
 

Requirements 

Our course requires students to develop and deploy several full-stack web apps and requires sophisticated custom full-stack autograders that use industrial-strength tooling. We needed both a student-facing IDE that was "ready to go" and didn't require futzing or installation on the student's part, but was also sophisticated enough to handle our autograding demands without requiring extensive instructor time spent on dev-ops or configuration.

  • Auto-Grading: Full-Stack Auto-Grading Support
  • Cloud IDE: "Ready-to-go" IDE with zero configuration needed
  • Course Text & Labs: Combination of course text and auto-graded programming labs
  • Easy Content Sharing: Ease of sharing course materials with other instructors

case studies logos (Presentation)

 

 

02

Why We Chose Codio

We wanted to be able to easily share materials with other instructors. Since 2012, sharing the content of our course has been critical to its success, and there had always been some challenges involved in sharing the full-stack coding assignments and their auto-graders. 
 
Codio has solved that problem, and even allows us to distribute the textbook alongside the assignments using Codio Guides, which lets instructors get the book AND the assignments in a single package. Overall, Codio is the most effective solution I've seen for sharing a combination of textbook and complex auto-graded programming labs.

getty-images-ZadtE16oVic-unsplash 1 (1)

 

 

03

Teaching with Codio


Courses Taught with Codio:
  • Advanced Software Engineering
  • Full-Stack Web Development

Student issues relating to installation, wrong versions of the development stack, etc., have disappeared. Sharing with other instructors is trivial and has encouraged them to adopt and adapt our materials and contribute to improving them.

Students can start working on complex assignments on day one with zero configuration. These issues seem obvious, and in introductory programming classes, they don't arise as often, but not having a good solution for these issues in a complex class like this one would be a showstopper.


Frame 1171276424 (1)

 

04

Working with Codio

Codio's support team is excellent. Because our TA's and instructors are technically competent when we actually do need support it tends to be a fairly specific and deep technical issue, and Codio has always been very responsive. Regarding our liaison Elise Deitrick, it feels like she's part of our extended course team.


05

Going Forward

We are recommending Codio to other courses in our program as well. (Admittedly, our courses are huge, and it's often hard to dislodge existing solutions, but Codio feels best-of-breed to me).

Furthermore, all development of new assignments in our course will be done on Codio, and we are developing questions specifically for use on coding exams where students will be able to "buy a hint" (by giving up some number of points) on an exam question in order to continue on to later parts of the question. We prototyped this in a bespoke system a few years ago, but Elise has identified a way to do it using Codio.

 

Related Articles

case studies logos (2)
Education
Columbia University
Codio is the key technology used to deliver Computer Science and Mathematics courses at this large Ivy League Institution—providing faculty with everything they need to deliver courses and everything students need to code.
case studies logos (3)
Education
eCornell
Codio enabled eCornell to offer more technical content for their students, while providing a flexible and powerful teaching and learning basis for topics like programming, data analysis, and AI/Machine learning.
case studies logos (12)
Education
University of Florida
At the University of Florida, Codio is used in large computing courses and fosters better student management, more efficient grading, and exams that will prepare students for programming interviews.
Get Started and [Achieve These Results] for Your Organization
Get a Demo Try for Free