DrPython–WEB: A Tool to Help Teaching Well-Written Python Programs

A good percentage of students, while learning how to program for the first time in a higher education course, often write inelegant code, i.e., code which is difficult to read, badly organized, not commented. Writing inelegant code reduces the student’s professional opportunities, and is an indication of a non-systematic programming style which makes it very difficult to maintain (or even understand) the code later, even by its own author. In this paper we present DrPython–WEB, a web application capable to automatically extract linguistic, structural and style-related features, from students’ programs and to grade them with respect to a teacher-defined assessment rubric. The aim of DrPython–WEB is to make the students accustomed to good coding practices, and stylistic features, and make their code better. There are other systems able to perform code analysis through quality measures: the novelty of DrPython–WEB, with respect to such systems, is in that it analyzes also linguistic and stylistic features.