Research
This is an overview of the results of my activities as a researcher, mostly from the period as a doctoral student. You can also view my ORCID profile.
Doctorate
The icing on the cake for every doctoral student is, in theory, the doctoral dissertation. I have dedicated a link:/doctoraat/[separate page}, which contains all the information.
- Niko Strijbol (September 2024). “Educational Software Testing for Textual and Block-based Programming Languages”. Doctoral thesis. Ghent University.
Articles
Below you can find a list of academic articles of which I am an author or co-author. All articles of which I am the first author are Open Access, which means you can read the articles freely. For other articles, it is best to contact the first author to obtain a copy.
- Niko Strijbol, Robbe De Proft, Klass Goethals, Bart Mesuere, Peter Dawyndt, and Christophe Scholliers (February 2024). “Blink: An educational software debugger for Scratch”. In: SoftwareX 25, p. 101617. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.softx.2023.101617
- Charlotte Van Petegem, Rien Maertens, Niko Strijbol, Jorg Van Renterghem, Felix Van der Jeugt, Bram De Wever, Peter Dawyndt, and Bart Mesuere (December 2023). “Dodona: Learn to code with a virtual co-teacher that supports active learning”. In: SoftwareX 24, p. 101578. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.softx.2023.101578
- Niko Strijbol, Charlotte Van Petegem, Rien Maertens, Boris Sels, Christophe Scholliers, Peter Dawyndt, and Bart Mesuere (May 2023). “TESTed—An educational testing framework with language-agnostic test suites for programming exercises”. In: SoftwareX 22, p. 101404. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.softx.2023.101404
- Charlotte Van Petegem, Louise Deconinck, Dieter Mourisse, Rien Maertens, Niko Strijbol, Bart Dhoedt, Bram De Wever, Peter Dawyndt, and Bart Mesuere (June 2022). “Pass/Fail Prediction in Programming Courses”. In: Journal of Educational Computing Research 61(1), p. 68–95. https://doi.org/10.1177/07356331221085595
- Rien Maertens, Charlotte Van Petegem, Niko Strijbol, Toon Baeyens, Arne Carla Jacobs, Peter Dawyndt, and Bart Mesuere (March 2022). “Dolos: Language-agnostic plagiarism detection in source code”. In: Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 38(4). https://doi.org/10.1111/jcal.12662
Posters
I have also presented a poster at a conference.
- Niko Strijbol, Christophe Scholliers, and Peter Dawyndt (June 2023). “Blink: An Educational Software Debugger for Scratch”. In: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education 2, p. 648. https://doi.org/10.1145/3587103.3594189
The poster itself is available here (pdf).
My master’s thesis
The content of this text is almost entirely superseded by the articles and the doctorate. However, some parts, such as the foreword by Prof. Dawyndt, may be worth reading for those interested in the history and origins of Dodona.
- Niko Strijbol, Peter Dawyndt, Bart Mesuere, and Charlotte Van Petegem (2020). “TESTed: one judge to rule them all”. Master’s thesis. Ghent University. https://lib.ugent.be/catalog/rug01:002836313
You can also find the text of my master’s thesis here (pdf). The source code of the text and program are available at https://github.com/niknetniko/universal-judge.
Other master’s theses
It is common that the first version of something that was later published as an article or included in my doctorate was created as a master’s thesis. Therefore, below is a list of relevant master’s theses for which I was a supervisor or jury member. Note that a lot of these are in Dutch.
- Vital Wang, Peter Dawyndt, and Christophe Scholliers (2025). “Scratch Timeline: A Visualization Framework for Testing And Debugging”. Master’s thesis. Ghent University.
- Henri Cattoire, Peter Dawyndt, Christophe Scholliers, and Niko Strijbol (2024). “Een nieuw uitvoeringsmodel voor Scratch 3.0”. Master’s thesis. Ghent University. https://lib.ugent.be/catalog/rug01:003214965
- Klaas Goethals, Peter Dawyndt, Christophe Scholliers, and Niko Strijbol (2023). “Een time travelling debugger voor Scratch 3.0”. Master’s thesis. Ghent University. https://lib.ugent.be/catalog/rug01:003150086
- Iwijn Voeten, Peter Dawyndt, Christophe Scholliers, and Niko Strijbol (2023). “Een blokgebaseerd testframework voor Scratch”. Master’s thesis. Ghent University. https://lib.ugent.be/catalog/rug01:003150096
- Robbe De Proft, Peter Dawyndt, Christophe Scholliers, and Niko Strijbol (2022). “Blink: een educatieve software-debugger voor Scratch 3.0”. Master’s thesis. Ghent University. https://lib.ugent.be/catalog/rug01:003059967
- Boris Sels, Peter Dawyndt, Bart Mesuere, Charlotte Van Petegem, and Niko Strijbol (2021). “TESTed: programmeertaal-onafhankelijk testen van oplossingen voor programmeeroefeningen”. Master’s thesis. Ghent University. https://lib.ugent.be/catalog/rug01:003008250
Finally, there is one more relevant master’s thesis for the Scratch part of my research. Note that I have not made any contribution to this thesis. Nevertheless, it should not be missing for the sake of completeness.
- Nils Mak, Peter Dawyndt, and Christophe Scholliers (2019). “Itch: een educatief testframework voor automatische feedback op Scratch projecten”. Master’s thesis. Ghent University. https://lib.ugent.be/catalog/rug01:002782933