The Role of Automation in Undergraduate Computer Science Education

Increasing enrollments in undergraduate computer science courses are overloading faculty, teaching assistants, labs, and other resources. To cope with resource problems, many universities have automated key processes such as program grading. Before replacing a manual process with an automated tool, we believe that two questions should be answered. First and most importantly, does the proposed automation contribute to or detract from student learning? Second, do the benefits outweigh the costs of the automation? In this paper we present results from an introductory programming course in which we have incorporated high levels of automation. We find that carefully designed and managed automation can improve student performance while realizing a significant savings of scarce teaching resources.