Teaching software testing presents difficulties due to its abstract and conceptual nature. The lack of tangible outcomes and limited emphasis on hands-on experience further compound the challenge, often leading to difficulties in comprehension for students. This can result in waning engagement and diminishing motivation over time. In this paper, we introduce online unit testing challenges with automated marking as a learning tool via the EdStem platform to enhance students' software testing skills and understanding of software testing concepts. Then, we conducted a survey to investigate the impact of the unit testing challenges with automated marking on student learning. The results from 92 participants showed that our unit testing challenges have kept students more engaged and motivated, fostering deeper understanding and learning, while the automated marking mechanism enhanced students' learning progress, helping them to understand their mistakes and misconceptions quicker than traditional-style human-written manual feedback. Consequently, these results inform educators that the online unit testing challenges with automated marking improve overall student learning experience, and are an effective pedagogical practice in software testing.

翻译：软件测试教学因其抽象性和概念性而面临诸多困难。缺乏具体成果以及实践环节强调不足进一步加剧了这一挑战，常导致学生理解困难，进而随时间推移出现参与度下降、学习动力减弱的问题。本文通过EdStem平台引入带有自动化评分的在线单元测试挑战作为学习工具，旨在提升学生的软件测试技能及对测试概念的理解。随后，我们开展了一项调查，探究自动化评分单元测试挑战对学生学习的影响。来自92名参与者的结果表明，我们的单元测试挑战使学生更投入、更具积极性，促进了更深层次的理解与学习；同时，自动化评分机制加速了学生的学习进度，帮助他们比传统人工书面反馈更迅速地识别错误与误解。因此，这些发现为教育工作者提供了启示：带有自动化评分的在线单元测试挑战能全面改善学生的学习体验，是软件测试领域一项有效的教学实践。