# A Pilot Experience with Software Programming Environments as a Service for Teaching Activities
## 7 Conclusions and Future Work  
This work has presented ACTaaS as an open-source educational tool to deploy on the cloud. It is a realistic software production environment for educational activities. The solution facilitates the usage of professional tools for software programming in practical laboratory lessons, allowing students to learn good practices on software engineering. In addition, it provides them with continuous feedback about their developments without the need for interaction with the teacher. The initial resource deployment is done in a simple and easy way (with just a command) in a few minutes. Then, the required configuration and orchestration of Jenkins for a set of students do not suppose a high workload to the teacher, thanks to the utilities ACTaaS offers. The required accounts and tests are easily created by using two easy commands. The pilot use case has demonstrated that the effort of the instructors is concentrated mainly in the development of assignments (identification of the required resources, description of exercises, etc...) and the creation of unit tests to automatically evaluate student development, and not on the deployment and orchestration of the required software instruments. Moreover, these tasks can be reused in future courses, minimising that initial effort. Regarding cloud technologies, the cloud production environment deployed for the pilot group has demonstrated to be always available to the students during the experiment. They could work on their assignments at any time and anywhere accessin the same production environment in a transparent way. Thus, cloud resources have proven to be effective in educational environments. As a last remark, the general opinion of the students is highly positive, demonstrating that the proposed solution of this work, ACTaaS, can be integrated in the classroom workflow with a good range of acceptance among students. However, this is an initial experience in a class. The valuable opinions collected will be considered to further improve and develop the solution for next courses. We plan to develop a graphical user interface for the teacher that includes the scripts and utilities shown, to facilitate even more its usage. Furthermore, we will continue working on improving the unit tests to enrich the feedback students receive. Additionally, it would be interesting as future work to provide new recipes to support the most common learning scenarios inside ACTaaS. Moreover, we plan to extend the usage of ACTaaS to all the assignments of the subject and deploy new infrastructures for all groups of the degree (around 300 students). In a more distant scenario, we also want to apply ACTaaS in other degrees where software programming is part of the curriculum. Finally, the capacity to automatically recollect software and usage metrics from CI/CD tools by using specific plug-ins opens an opportunity to establish relations between these metrics and the skills related to the Computational Thinking. This is a crucial point to continue with future ACTaaS developments. Conceptualization, A.C.A. and J.D.S.Q. ; Funding acquisition, J.D.S.Q. ; Investigation, A.C.A., M.R.M. and J.D.S.Q. ; Resources A.C.A. ; Software, M.R.M. ; Supervision, J.D.S.Q. ; Validation, J.D.S.Q. ; Writing--original draft, A.C.A. and J.D.S.Q. ; Writing--review & editing, A.C.A. Authors contributed equally to this work. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. This research was funded by Conselleria d'Innovacio, Universitat, Ciencia i Societat Digital for the project \"CloudSTEM\" grant number AICO/2019/313, and the Vicerrectorado de Estudios, Calidad y Acreditacion of the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia grant number PIME/19-20/166. Not applicable. The authors declare no conflict of interest. The following abbreviations are used in this manuscript: