Experience with an automatically assessed course

This paper describes our experiences of developing and running an introductory module for first year Computing undergraduates. The 'Supporting Technologies' module is intended to equip students with basic computing skills that they will need for the rest of their course. A novel feature of the work discussed here is that several different automated assessment tools and techniques are integrated into a common framework sharing a common results database. This allows a wide range of different assessment formats within the same module framework.