Framework for Gamified Programming Education
FGPE Plus: Learning tools interoperability for gamified programming education
Partners
- Uniwersytet Szczeciński (Poland)
- INESC TEC – Instituto De Engenharia De Sistemas E Computadores Tecnologia E Ciência (Portugal)
- Universita Degli Studi Di Napoli Parthenope (Italy)
- Kauno Technologijos Universitetas, Kaunas, Lithuania
Project Reference
Realization period: from 01/06/2021 to 31/05/2023 EU Grant: 268,160 EUR Programme: Erasmus+ Key Action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices Action Type: Strategic Partnerships for higher education
Aim
The project aims at providing necessary software and educational content for an effective application of gamification in programming education primarily in higher education institutions by extending the key elements of the framework developed in the prior FGPE project.
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in many higher-education institutions forced to switch to e learning. It became clear that to make use of the full potential of gamified exercises, they should be embedded in e-learning courses rather than provided via a separate platform. This could be done by adopting the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standard, allowing students to be directed to the gamified learning environment to solve programing exercises with their results automatically sent back to the e-learning platform. While simple in description, LTI is complex and adding the support for it to the FGPE software platform is a task beyond the limited resources of the FGPE project. Furthermore, while the amount of gamified exercises to be developed in the FGPE project seemed to be sufficient considering its original scope of application, with the whole education moved to e-learning, there is a need to provide more online courses involving the use of programming languages in a gamified form.
Moreover, the already performed tests of the FGPE authoring tool for gamified programming exercises revealed that most of the instructors it was shown to are in great need of a guide of how to design such exercises, despite being presented with both the reference on available gamification techniques and the user manual for the tool. We believe this need can be effectively satisfied with an interactive tutorial on how to design and implement gamified programming course.
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 four intellectual outputs:
- LTI Integration (software): enabling the use of gamified programming exercises within courses provided via popular LMS environments;
- Mobile gamified PLE (software): improving the experience of the programming learning environment for mobile device users;
- Tutorial on gamification of programming exercises (guidance material): interactively guiding programming instructors on how to design and implement gamified programming courses;
- Extended gamified exercise base (Open Educational Resource): extending the set of open-source gamified programming resources with new courses featuring 520 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.
