CSC News
Xie’s Work with "Pex for Fun" Featured in Blog
The work of Dr. Tao Xie, associate professor of computer science at NC State, has been featured in a blog called “daily edventures – Anthony Salcito’s 365-day look at global heroes in education.” The blog is written about Xie’s collaborator, Jonathan “Peli” de Halleux, a senior research software design engineer at Microsoft Research.
Collaborating with Nikolai Tillman, a principal research software design engineer at Microsoft Research, de Halleux has done extensive work on software testing, and decided to provide a web version of their tool – Pex – to make it more accessible and easy to demonstrate. As their long-term collaborator, Tao suggested turning it into a game, Pex for Fun, and the software testing tool became an online game where players had to solve coding duels. In Pex for Fun, you can write, compile and run code in order to learn programming concepts, practice your coding and software engineering skills and analyze the behavior of code interactively. Since Pex for Fun’s release in 2010, there have been more than 1.1 million game-play interactions made by players from around the world.Pex for Fun is described in an upcoming conference paper titled “Teaching and Learning Programming and Software Engineering via Interactive Gaming” to be presented in May, 2013 at the 35th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2013), Software Engineering Education (SEE) Track. The paper is co-authored by Nikolai Tillmann, Jonathan de Halleux, Tao Xie, Sumit Gulwani and Judith Bishop.
To read the entire blog entry, click here.
To read the upcoming conference paper, click here.
For more information on Pex For Fun, click here.
For more information on Dr. Xie, click here.
~coates~
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