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The main goal of an introductory programming course for computer scientists is to develop programming competences. The question arises how to assess those competences. As there are concerns, if written and oral examinations are valid exam environments for students to demonstrate their programming skills, there is a need for an alternative exam type. Computer based laboratory examination (lab exams) promises to be a valid, reliable, efficient and competence-oriented assessment method. Therefore, the assumption is that it provides an important contribution to presently existing set of assessment methods. In this paper, we present the motivation and goals for the use of lab exams and provide background information on the course and environment we applied it on. Furthermore, results of a questionnaire-based study are demonstrated, where it is analysed how students experience this new exam type, as for example if they value the benefit of validity, accuracy and fairness and how they evaluate the lab exam as a possibility to measure action-related competences. In addition, identified factors related to the students' possibility to show their programming competences in the lab exam are presented. Finally, the conclusion explains that computer based laboratory examination is a meaningful way to assess relevant computer programming competences.

We present an innovative L-shaped trifocal system involving a high-end main camera with a compact assistant stereo rig attached to it. The system can accurately reconstruct dense disparity information which enables the creation and processing of high-quality 3D film content based on virtual view synthesis. In particular, our system provides compactness and increased flexibility in the spatial camera arrangement, improving upon previous approaches which have focused on linear camera arrays. We provide technical details on our whole workflow, ranging from the hardware design to the key algorithms including rectification, disparity computation and virtual view synthesis based on inter-camera mapping. A subjective evaluation based on a user study demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed approach in terms of quality of the 3D viewing experience.