Given that researchers in scientific fields all but require computational skills to do their research, it is surprising science programs in universities often lack programming courses. It is also surprising that a wide-ranging, high-quality, learning-by-doing website for helping those students doesn’t already exist on the internet—free nor proprietary. We created a website called Project Lovelace that aims to help science students to help driven science students learn those skills by solving engaging, relevant programming problems. Project Lovelace consists of the website itself and the Secure Python Execution Code Server (SPECS), which is also referred to as “the Engine”. The Engine is responsible for verifying the programs that the users submit as solutions to the website’s problems. This project focuses on the development of the Engine. We will show how it was designed and implemented, as well as the challenges we faced.