The ops-class.org Instructional Operating Systems Framework
Operating systems are the masterworks of computer systems—stable, mature, well-designed systems that have evolved for decades to respond to user needs and hardware capabilities. ops-class.org is an online framework based on the Harvard’s OS/161 instruction operating system designed to allow students anywhere to learn to design and program operating systems.
Currently ops-class.org is used by
Geoffrey Challen and the blue Systems Research
Group at the University at Buffalo (UB) to teach "CSE
421/521: Introduction to Operating Systems."
The ops-class framework has successfully provided UB students with the
ability to complete the same assignments offered to Harvard students
despite significantly-fewer human instructional resources.
By automating and standardizing online grading,
ops-class.org allows teaching assistants to reduce
the time they spend grading and increase the time they spend helping students
complete the assignments.
In 2016, Scott Haseley and Yihong
Chen significantly improve the existing automated grading infrastructure
through the addition of a new declarative distributed testing tool called
test161.
test161 now allows students anywhere to complete and evaluate the
automatically-graded portions of the OS/161 assignments for free on their own
machines.
test161 secures the remote testing process by embedding secrets into the
testing suite at compile time.
This allows us to distribute almost all tests to students—avoiding the
"security via obscurity" approach taken by many classes that use automated
grading—while preventing students from reverse engineering graded
evaluations.
test161 also maintains leader boards and shows the progress of online
grading interactively through a web interface built using
Meteor and React.