SystemC modeling skills assessment in Moodle environment

Abstract

The paper presents a knowledge and skills assessment solution developed to test the skills that the students have gained in SystemC modeling. Previously, the pen and paper form course exams were used that were popular neither with students nor with teachers. What is more, this form was not suitable for student's debugging skills verification, and the students had no possibility to check their solutions before submitting them for evaluation. Therefore there was an urgent need to change the exam form. Several knowledge assessment tools have been developed enabling to evaluate the practical skills in using hardware description languages (HDLs). The tool supporting SystemC language has been developed in the form of a new Moodle activity module. It enables the SystemC source code editing, compilation, and simulation. Syntax highlighting editor is an integral part of the module. However, to compile and simulate the SystemC model the external tools are used. These tools are located on server and invoked from PHP code by means of calling the specially designed shell scripts. Automated evaluation of the submitted solutions is also supported and based on the simulation results comparison. In case of incorrect simulation results some points can be assigned syntactical correctness.