Interoperability of Inginious and Dodona

Inginious and Dodona are two platforms meant to automatically test programming code written by students. Inginious is developed by the UCLouvain and Dodona by the University of Ghent. For each exercise on each platform, the professor has to write an exercise statement, and some files to test the code. These files can be scripts, for Inginious, or input-output files, for Dodona. The files are not the same for each platform, which means that if we want to create an exercise for the two platforms, we have to write the exercise twice. We cannot reuse the exercises of one platform for the other, in order to increase the number of exercises available. A need to make exercises of each platform compatible with the other was therefore felt. Both platforms are written in Python. We can therefore try to create scripts of an acceptable difficulty that make the exercises compatible between the two platforms. To achieve that goal, our solution is to convert the exercises into the format of the other platform. As both platforms needs different files to manage the exercises, we will need specific scripts to go from one platform to the other. After the transformation, the exercises will be compatible with the platform on which we want to run it. A generic format could also be foreseen in a later stage to make exercises compatible with other platforms as well, provided the creation of appropriate conversion scripts.