Arena Acadnet - An educational platform for practicing and solving coding challenges

Abstract

This paper introduces Arena Acadnet, a modular, role-based educational platform designed to support engineering-oriented programming contests, with a focus on real-time debugging and code correction. Developed for the Romanian National Olympiad of Applied Informatics, the platform addresses a gap in existing online judges by enabling the automated assessment of faulty code and integrating customizable evaluation pipelines. Arena Acadnet features a decoupled architecture comprising: (1) an ASP.NET Core web application with fine-grained role-based access control; (2) a scalable submission checker built on Flask, RabbitMQ, and Docker for parallel, sandboxed code execution; and (3) a monitoring subsystem based on Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry for infrastructure diagnostics. Contributions include a reproducible system for secure execution of untrusted student code, a custom checker integration mechanism allowing structural and semantic constraints, and empirical performance validation under contest conditions. The platform processed over 10,000 submissions in 2025 with sub-2s response latency and linear scalability across 12 RMQ workers, confirming its robustness for high-load educational environments. Source code and deployment configurations are open source, enabling adaptation to similar competitive or instructional contexts.