Abstract

Hands-on exercises are often used to improve student engagement and knowledge retention in systems, networking and cybersecurity classes. Even when students comprehend the concepts, they may lack the skills to complete an exercise. Teachers need effective tools to identify these problemsduring an assignment and offer targeted and timely help.
This paper explores the use of terminal histories with milestone detection to enable rapid, automated and on-going assessment of student work while performing hands-on exercises. We describe our system, called ACSLE, which monitors terminal input and output for each student, compares it with desired milestones, and produces both summaries and detailed statistics of student progress.
We analyze data from undergraduates at two colleges, as they performed several well-structured cybersecurity assignments on a network testbed. We show how ACSLE's output …

Date

2020

Authors

Jelena Mirkovic, Aashray Aggarwal, David Weinman, Paul Lepe, Jens Mache, Richard Weiss

Book

Proceedings of the 51st ACM technical symposium on computer science education

Pages

866-872