The preparation of programming exercises is a time-consuming effort. In order to save a significant part of that time, a tool dedicated to editing gamified programming exercises, FGPE AuthorKit has been developed.
The tool has a convenient user interface which guides the authors through the whole process of preparing gamified programming exercises with two separate form wizards: one to create the content of exercises and the other to create corresponding gamification layer. The former allows to specify all the components of a programming exercise (e.g., problem statement or input/output test files). The latter has steps to (1) define the metadata of the gamification layer, (2) specify higher-level rewards (beyond a single challenge), (3) wire the rules of the course, (4) define the leaderboards by specifying their metrics, and (5) build the challenge tree, where each challenge may have child challenges and/or local scoped rules, leaderboards, and rewards.
The respective exercise definition layers are stored in two dedicated formats – Yet Another Programming Exercises Interoperability Language (YAPExIL) and Gamified Education Interoperability Language (GEdIL).
The tool has been implemented as a web application, with a dedicated API, allowing the user to import content from popular non-gamified exercise formats, and export it or share it with other peers, internally or via a GitHub repository where all exercise data is synchronized.
The source code of the tool is open and freely available at GitHub (there are two repositories: for the tool frontend and backend respectively).
