Construction of an Execution Environment using Container Type Virtualization for a Support System of Programming Exercises with Game Strategies and Contests

We have proposed applied programming exercises with game strategies. This exercise is a contest style using poker game and board game strategy. In these exercises, each support system provides its own execution environment. To experience continuous integration, we have set a preliminary contest period to accept submissions many times. During this period, a large amount of code execution is performed on the server-side. Due to this, the presentation of the execution results is delayed. In this research, we have developed an independent and safe program execution platform Cachalot suitable for programming exercises using game strategies. The purpose is to improve the response quality to the learners and to consolidate and generalize the execution environment that each support system has been uniquely implemented. We implemented distributed execution with multiple computers using a container type virtual environment. To evaluate this method, we applied Cachalot to the exercise support system WinT for a poker exercise. We experimented on response quality and collected indicators such as processing time. This confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method for response quality.