ESMAD - DI - Comunicações em eventos científicos
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Browsing ESMAD - DI - Comunicações em eventos científicos by Author "Leal, José Paulo"
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- Authoring game-based programming challenges to improve students’ motivationPublication . Paiva, José Carlos; Leal, José Paulo; Queirós, RicardoOne of the great challenges in programming education is to keep students motivated while working on their programming assignments. Of the techniques proposed in the literature to engage students, gamification is arguably the most widely spread and effective method. Nevertheless, gamification is not a panacea and can be harmful to students. Challenges comprising intrinsic motivators of games, such as graphical feedback and game-thinking, are more prone to have longterm positive effects on students, but those are typically complex to create or adapt to slightly distinct contexts. This paper presents Asura, a game-based programming assessment environment providing means to minimize the hurdle of building game challenges. These challenges invite the student to code a Software Agent to solve a certain problem, in a way that can defeat every opponent. Moreover, the experiment conducted to assess the difficulty of authoring Asura challenges is described.
- Defining requirements for a gamified programming exercises formatPublication . Swacha, Jakub; Queirós, Ricardo; Paiva, José Carlos; Leal, José PauloComputer programming is a complex domain both to teach and learn. This incited endeavors to find methods that could mitigateat least some of the existing barriers. In the last years, automatic assessment has been playing an important role in reducing theburden of teachers in the assessment of students’ attempts to solve programming exercises and fostering the autonomy of studentsby allowing them to practice in any place and at any time with timely feedback.Even more recent development is the use of gamification in computer programming education in order to raise the enjoyment andengagement of students. Despite its rising spread, until now, there is not a programming exercise specification format addressingthe needs of gamification, such as the definition of challenges, the underlying storyline, including the links to other exercises, orthe rewards for solving challenges in form of points, badges or virtual items. Such a data format would allow the exchange ofready-to-use programming exercises along with the gamification-related data among different educational institutions and courses,providing instructors a possibility to make use of gamification in their courses without having to invest their own time in defininggamification rules themselves.In this paper, we analyze a set of concepts related to programming gamification developed in our previous work to identify therequirements for the specification of a gamified exercise format.
- Fostering students-driven learning of computer programming with an ensemble of e-learning toolsPublication . Queirós, Ricardo; Leal, José PauloLearning through practice is crucial to acquire a complex skill. Nevertheless, learning is only effective if students have at their disposal a wide range of exercises that cover all the course syllabus and if their solutions are promptly evaluated and given the appropriate feedback. Currently the teaching-learning process in complex domains, such as computer programming, is characterized by an extensive curricula and a high enrolment of students. This poses a great workload for faculty and teaching assistants responsible for the creation, delivering and assessment of student exercises. In order to address these issues, we created an e-learning framework - called Ensemble - as a conceptual tool to organize and facilitate technical interoperability among systems and services in domains that use complex evaluation. These domains need a diversity of tools, from the environments where exercises are solved, to automatic evaluators providing feedback on the attempts of students, not forgetting the authoring, management and sequencing of exercises. This paper presents and analyzes the use of Ensemble for managing the teaching-learning process in an introductory programming course at ESEIG - a school of the Polytechnic of Porto. An experiment was conducted to validate a set of hypotheses regarding the expected gains: increase in number of solved exercises, increase class attendance, improve final grades. They support the conclusion that the use of this e-learning framework for the practice-based learning has a positive impact on the acquisition of complex skills, such as computer programming.