Uploaded April 2018 | Updated September 2026, 3 minutes ago
We’re all buzzing about Headless Chrome and how we can automate our testing, but what if we go one step further and try automated marking of… untrusted student code?
Imagine the sort of code you first wrote — full of syntax errors and infinite loops — now load that code on to a server and click ‘Test’. What happens? Did you crash the page? Did it do anything?
At Grok Learning we are allowing kids as young as twelve (think ‘Stranger Things’!) to do exactly that. Come discover the challenges we had putting together a JavaScript course with a smart automatic marker that defends our system against whatever crazy code they come up with.
We’ll get technical and talk about how we’re using Headless Chrome and Puppeteer inside our server-side marker. We’ll dip into what makes it ‘smart’ — good feedback and hints to help students understand why their code doesn’t work the way they expected. And we’ll chat about how to make a good learning experience for JavaScript.
Let’s ditch to-do list tutorials and make something better!
We’re all buzzing about Headless Chrome and how we can automate our testing, but what if we go one step further and try automated marking of… untrusted student code?
Imagine the sort of code you first wrote — full of syntax errors and infinite loops — now load that code on to a server and click ‘Test’. What happens? Did you crash the page? Did it do anything?
At Grok Learning we are allowing kids as young as twelve (think ‘Stranger Things’!) to do exactly that. Come discover the challenges we had putting together a JavaScript course with a smart automatic marker that defends our system against whatever crazy code they come up with.
We’ll get technical and talk about how we’re using Headless Chrome and Puppeteer inside our server-side marker. We’ll dip into what makes it ‘smart’ — good feedback and hints to help students understand why their code doesn’t work the way they expected. And we’ll chat about how to make a good learning experience for JavaScript.
Let’s ditch to-do list tutorials and make something better!
