ESMAD - DI - Comunicações em eventos científicos
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Browsing ESMAD - DI - Comunicações em eventos científicos by Author "Paiva, José Carlos"
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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.
- Towards a framework for gamified programming educationPublication . Swacha, Jakub; Queirós, Ricardo; Paiva, José CarlosComputer programming is a difficult subject that can only be mastered with lots of practice. It is therefore of primary importance to rise and retain students' engagement during a programming course, a task in which gamification has been proven as a competent method. Even though there are numerous reports on applying gamification to programming courses, there are no available open resources or dedicated platforms that could be used by programming teachers to gamify their courses, meeting both the requirements of being easy to adopt and leaving the decisions on the scope of the course and the level of gamification to the teachers themselves. In order to fulfill this gap, a consortium of four European institutions initiated a common project to develop open gamified programming exercises and interactive course materials for popular programming languages. In this paper, we report the results of the first stage of this work, which defined the range of gamification concepts to be covered within the developed framework and its evaluation by students.