Resource
Code Viva
Code Viva runs a written, timed version of an viva for every student in a programming course, about fifteen to twenty minutes each, without an instructor in the room. It reads a student's submitted code and commit history, writes four to six questions about that student's own functions, names and commits, and gives each student a personal link to answer from.
What you can do with it
Submissions come from a Gradescope export, a Canvas download zip, a folder-per-student zip, or GitHub Classroom with a read token. The instructor sets session length, question count and deadline, marks extended time at 1.25x to 3x, and reads, edits or replaces the generated questions before sending links. Questions cover recursion base cases, edge guards, data structure choices, opaque variable names, scale and tracing, sentences from the assignment spec, and commit patterns such as one bulk or late-night commit. Answers return as a response code, and the review screen shows each transcript beside a proposed 0 to 3 score with the sentences it rests on, plus a flag queue ordered by how much a conversation is warranted. Results export to CSV, and eleven demo courses let a reader try the whole loop on invented data.
Who it is for
Instructors of programming courses who want evidence that a student can explain their own code, and who would rather talk to a short list of students than to all of them; the commit questions make it a form of Process-Oriented Assessment.
Notes and caveats
Everything runs in the browser: the course sits in local storage with a JSON export, questions travel in the part of a link browsers do not send to servers, and answers come back only as codes students choose to send, so no student data reaches a third party. The question generator is rule-based rather than model-driven. By the tool's own account its code reader is heuristic, so unusual formatting or macros can hide a function, and a score can reward knowing the vocabulary rather than understanding the code, which is why scores are proposals an instructor approves and why it advises keeping the stakes low. No license and no source repository are published, and because links carry the questions they run to a few kilobytes, long enough to wrap in a learning management message box.