Software

• DLUnit
• KielceRB
• MIPSUnit
• Zawilinski
• JLSCircuitTester (replaced by DLUnit)

DLUnit

DLUnit is a JUnit-based unit testing framework for simulated digital logic circuits. Specifically, it allows students to write JUnit tests for circuits they build using either the JLS and Logisim digital logic simulators.

More details here.

Download.

KielceRB

KielceRB is a highly customizable templating engine for generating assignments, syllabi, web pages and other course documents. It loads a hierarchy of key-value pairs from files at various file system levels. These values can then be inserted into documents using Ruby's ERB templating engine. KielceRB simplifies the maintenance of course documents by moving data that changes regularly into external data files where they can be easily identified and updated. By loading data from various file system levels, it is easy to share values among all documents for a particular course and/or semester.

KielceRB also provides methods for including one document inside another allowing users to easily share common content among several pages (navigation bars, contact information, assignment headers, etc.).

For more details, see the project's GitHub page.

To download/install, you can either

• install the Ruby gem kielce (i.e., run gem install kielce), or
• download the source from GitHub and run it from there.

MIPSUnit

MIPSUnit is a suite of two unit testing frameworks for MIPS assembly:

• MIPSUnit::MSpec is an RSpec-inspired testing framework, and
• MIPSUnit::MUnit is a JUnit-based testing framework.

Each framework has its own strengths and weaknesses (see the individual pages for details); but, at a high level:

• We expect students will be more comfortable writing MUnit tests, because far more students have used Java and JUnit than Ruby and RSpec; however,
• we find it much easier to concisely write thorough/exhaustive tests using MSpec. MSpec also produces a stand-alone assembly file containing the tests. Thus, students need not every use MSpec directly.

More details about MSpec.

More details about MUnit.

Zawilinski

Zawilinski is a Java library designed specifically to simplify the extraction of data from Wiktionary entries; more generally, it simplifies the process of loading and filtering MediaWiki XML dumps so that the resulting document object tree is of manageable size (i.e., small enough so that generating and accessing the object tree doesn't cause a typical desktop computer to "thrash").

One main advantage of Zawilinski over other libraries for analyzing MediaWiki content is that it uses tools and techniques that would be familiar to many CS 1 and CS 2 students. For example, many other tools require a database, which may be intimidating for undergraduates who have limited systems administration experience.

Details
Documentation
Download (Version 1.1.0)

JLSCircuitTester

Practical Uses

Greatly simplifies the grading of digital logic simulator-based assignments.

Pedagogical Uses

1. Encourages students to more thoroughly test their circuits by simplifying the generation and running of tests.
2. Provides a framework with which students can be shown testing in a non-programming context. (In other words, instructors can use JLSCircuitTester to show students that the same principles they learn to test their code can be applied to other things.)

Publications

1. D. Poplawski, Z. Kurmas. "JLS/JLSCircuitTester: A Comprehensive Logic Design and Simulation Tool." 8th Koli Calling International Conference On Computing Education Research, November 2008.
2. Z. Kurmas. Improving student performance using automated testing of simulated digital logic circuits. Proceedings of the 13th annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education (ITiCSE 2008), July 2008.
3. Z. Kurmas. Automated Testing of Simulated Digital Circuits and CPUs. Poster presented at SIGCSE 2008.

Updated Monday, 27 May 2024, 7:39 PM