A web-based online platform of distribution, collection, and validation for assignments in android programming learning assistance system

Currently, Android smartphones have dominated the distribution of mobile devices around the world. Then, with high demands for Android programming jobs, large numbers of schools, universities, and professional training institutions offer related courses. The Android Programming Learning Assistance System (APLAS) has been developed to accommodate independent and automatic assisting learning for students to learn Android programming by adopting test-driven development (TDD) method. APLAS offers learning materials to systematically study Android programming through solving topics with four stages and provides features for automatic validation of the student’s answers by running given test codes. However, a platform to support various activities of teachers for handling a lot of students in the courses is not implemented yet, and it made their load become very high. This paper presents the proposal of online platform in APLAS for distributing the learning materials, collecting the student’s answers, and validating them, based on a web application system. By using Gradle, a validator program was developed for running the test codes automatically in the server when a new answer is submitted. A comprehensive evaluation has been applied by asking 60 undergraduate students in an Indonesian university to use the online platform, solve three APLAS learning topics, and submit the answers. The results showed that the three functions worked properly, and the validation process of 183 submissions from all students delivered correct results on the server. The stability, robustness, effectiveness, performance, and security of the online platform were confirmed by analyzing the data of users’ activities and validation results. The significant reduction in processing time on all three functions also confirmed its effectiveness and improvement. Finally, the students’ feedback proved its usability.