[asdff]

For CS1 you probably don't need much compute power for assignments. Schools are already well funded enough to sometimes offer freshman ipad pros. You could offer them a raspberry pi or some extremely cheap, low powered PC, make them return it after the semester if you want to save them money. You can firewall it from the open internet, and have students turn in their code from this device alone to a university server. They can still cheat, sure, but to do it would mean transcribing code from one device to another by hand, which is enough friction and a timesink where fewer students would consider it versus actually paying attention in class.

[mechanical_bear]

“enough friction and a timesink”

Have you taught students before? Many will spend inordinate amounts of time to not learn the material. Often times it seems there is no friction too great if it allows one to not think too hard.

[asdff]

Yes, and I've been one, and know that time is finite and you have more than one class that demands work on a deadline, along with all the other fun stuff college has that pulls you away from your studies, and the not so fun stuff like part time employment. If you leave the system as it is today, its easy to copy and paste code. If you do something akin to what I proposed, you've eliminated copy and paste, and made cheating into a literal chore that isn't saving you nearly as much time as it would have otherwise, and fewer students will end up cheating. You'd be surprised at how many students I knew in undergrad who would be broke and would still pay like $400 a semester on textbooks because the friction of doing hackery things like photocopying chapters of the book in the library, or googling "my math book 2nd ed. pdf" and finding the library genesis result was just too much.

Of course the death blow for this sort of cheating is the exam, which you weight quite a bit more than the homework. A student who just copy and pastes code will still fail the class, since they can't use chatgpt in the lecture hall during exam time.

[jefftk]

And then someone in the dorm makes a keystroke injector, and everyone goes back to typing their code on their own computer.

Ex: https://null-byte.wonderhowto.com/how-to/make-your-own-bad-u...

[asdff]

IT dept can disable loading volumes that aren't the university shared drive for assignment turn in. They can also supply laptops vs desktops with wired keyboards.

[jefftk]

I'm proposing a device that pretends to be a keyboard, and mimics typing in the code

[asdff]

And a counter for that could be a laptop device with the usb ports disabled. A lot of this stuff is solved with some basic IT imo.

[dinkumthinkum]

Yeah but what you’re talking about is a simple typing exercise.