Design and Implementation of Extensible Online Experimental Teaching Platform Based on Message Queuing Mechanism.

Experiment is an important part of computer science education. In recent years, the online experimentation platform has become the main way of experimenting in computer science courses due to the convenience of online experimentation, which is not restricted by time or location and is easy to implement. The current status of the online experiment platform is mostly developed independently by each course, with highly coupled frontend backend and databases, and has large differences between the platforms, so that students lack a unified online experiment experience in the experiment process and have high adaptation costs to the new experiment platform. Besides, the teaching side has difficulties in analyzing and comparing because of the lack of unified experiment data management due to the scattered and differentiated platforms. In view of the current status of the online experiment platform, this paper proposes a new extensible online experiment platform architecture based on the message queue mechanism, and implements an extensible online experimental platform, UNILAB, which supports the online experiments of the online judge type or CI evaluation type courses. The extensible online experiment platform decouples the front and back ends of the traditional design, is more universal in the experiment teaching process, and brings a more consistent usage experience for the user. The platform provides unified data management and comparative analysis, which is beneficial for the teaching team to analyze the data and experimental behavior, and help them improve their experiment teaching. The message queue mechanism has good extensibility, which can provide low-cost insertion for new courses. The new experiment evaluation request can be easily added to the queue, dispatched to the corresponding module, and returned to the user. The platform has supported the experiments of several courses these years, including Fundamentals of C++ Program, Operating System, and other courses, and got good feedback from both the students and the teachers.