Among the results of the ongoing FGPE project are both an open-access specification of the gamification scheme for programming exercises and a user manual for the FGPE authoring kit for preparing gamified programming exercises. In theory, these two documents (addressing both the high and low level of gamified exercise development) should be sufficient for the instructors to apply gamification to their programming courses. In reality, we have found in the tests they are not, as the instructors are often doing for the first time something they never did before and they do not understand everything they should to do it properly.
As more than one of the FGPE authoring kit testers pointed out, what they actually need is a tutorial starting at an empty project and ending at a working gamified programming course.
We want therefore to respond to this need by developing an open-access interactive tutorial guiding the instructors step-by-step on how to develop a gamified programming course with a selection of non-trivial gamification mechanisms implemented. It will have to clearly explain the purpose for which certain steps are made and what kind of outcomes are expected by incorporating specific gamification mechanism (possibly also why they may not work and what could be done to help they do). We strongly believe this will remove the know-how barrier hampering the adoption of gamification in programming education, and, in the long term, will contribute to extension of the FGPE-compatible open repository of programming exercises with third-party contributions.
The target group for this IO are programming instructors interested in adding the gamification layer to their existing programming courses or developing new gamified programming courses from the scratch. They need to know exactly how to do that, especially for the first gamified course they develop.
The IO is innovative as so far no similar programming gamification tutorial exists.
The expected impact of this IO is significant, as it allows for a much wider group of programming instructors to acquire the know-how necessary to develop their own gamified courses.
