Hands-on computing education requires a realistic learning environment that enables students to gain and deepen their skills. Available learning environments, including virtual and physical laboratories, provide students with real-world computer systems but rarely adapt the learning environment to individual students of various proficiency and…

A measure of similarity of educational items has many applications in adaptive learning systems and can be useful also for teachers and content creators. We provide a thorough overview of approaches for measuring item similarity. We document the computation pipeline, explicitly highlighting many choices that have to be made in order to quantify…