Framework for Gamified Programming Education (Erasmus+ Programme)

About project

Background

Skilled programmers are in high demand in the European Union countries, and the key obstacle to satisfy this demand is the difficulty in learning programming. We believe a progress in this area can be attained with the combined use of automated assessment, which provides fast feedback to the students experimenting with their code, and gamification, which provides additional motivation for the students to intensify their learning effort. In our opinion, the availability of programming courses based on such an approach may not only improve the effectiveness of learning programming, but also extend the group of people feeling capable of effectively learning it. Nonetheless, up to this date, there are no available open collections of gamified programming exercises, no open interactive programming learning environment that would support such exercises, and even no open standard for the representation of such exercises, so that they could be developed in different educational institutions and shared among them.

Aim

The primary objective of the project is therefore to provide a framework for application of gamification to programming education, including the necessary specifications (of the gamification scheme and the exercise definition format), collection of gamified exercises (for popular programming languages) and software (a toolset for editing the exercises and an interactive learning environment providing them to the students). The target group of the project are programming instructors and students learning programming (also self-teaching).

Activities

There are two main types of activities that the project consists of: development of its intellectual outputs and dissemination of the information about the possibilities and benefits of applying gamification to programming education using the project’s intellectual outputs to programming instructors and students of various educational institutions.

Expected results

The project is planned to deliver five intellectual outputs: two specification documents (gamification scheme and programming exercise description format specification), two types of software (tools for authoring and conversion of exercises, and the gamified interactive learning environment) and a library of gamified programming exercises. All the project outputs will be freely available in the Internet under open source licenses. The expected impact of the project is an improvement in efficiency of programming education and its student-perceived experience.

Partners

Uniwersytet Szczeciński (Poland)
INESC TEC – Instituto De Engenharia De Sistemas E Computadores Tecnologia E Ciência (Portugal)
Universita Degli Studi Di Napoli Parthenope (Italy)
Aalborg Universitet (Denmark)

Project Reference: 2018-1-PL01-KA203-050803
Realization period: from 01/09/2018 to 31/08/2021
EU Grant: 326779 EUR
Programme: Erasmus+
Key Action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices
Action Type: Strategic Partnerships for higher education