ESMAD - DI - Comunicações em eventos científicos
Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Browsing ESMAD - DI - Comunicações em eventos científicos by Subject "E-learning"
Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
Results Per Page
Sort Options
- 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.
- Learning JavaScript in a local playgroundPublication . Queirós, RicardoJavaScript is currently one of the most popular languages worldwide. Its meteoric rise is mainly due to the fact that the language is no longer bound to the limits of the browser and can now be used on several platforms. This growth has led to its increasing use by companies and, consequently, to become part of the curriculum in schools. Meanwhile, in the teaching-learning process of computer programming, teachers continue to use automatic code evaluation systems to relieve their timeconsuming and error prone evaluation work. However, these systems reveal a number of issues: they are very generic (one size fits all), they have scarce features to foster exercises authoring, they do not adhere to interoperability standards (e.g. LMS communication), they rely solely on remote evaluators being exposed to single point of failure problems and reducing application performance and user experience, which is a feature well appreciated by the mobile users. In this context, LearnJS is presented as a Web playground for practicing the JavaScript language. The system uses a local evaluator (the user’s own browser) making response times small and thus benefiting the user experience. LearnJS also uses a sophisticated authoring system that allows the teacher to quickly create new exercises and aggregate them into gamified activities. Finally, LearnJS includes universal LMS connectors based on international specifications. In order to validate its use, an evaluation was made by a group of students of Porto Polytechnic aiming to validate the usability of its graphical user interface.
- LearnJS - a JavaScript learning playgroundPublication . Queirós, RicardoThe JavaScript ecosystem is evolving dramatically. Nowadays, the language is no longer confined to the boundaries of the browser and is now running in both sides of the Web stack. At the same time, JavaScript it’s starting to play also an important role in desktop and mobile applications development. These facts are leading companies to massively adopt JavaScript in their Web/mobile projects and schools to augment the language spectrum among their courses curricula. Several platforms appeared in recent years aiming to foster the learning of the JavaScript language. Those platforms are mainly characterized with sophisticated UI which allow users to learn JavaScript in a playful and interactive way. Despite its apparent success, these environments are not suitable to be integrated in existent educational platforms. Beyond these interoperability issues, most of these platforms are rigid not allowing teachers to contribute with new exercises, organize the existent exercises in more suitable and modular activities to be deployed in their courses, neither keep track of student’s progress. This paper presents LearnJS as a simple and flexible platform to teach and learn JavaScript. In this platform, instructors can contribute with new exercises and combine them with expositive resources (e.g videos) to define specific course activities. These activities can be gamified with the injection of dynamic attributes to reward the most successful attempts. Finally, instructors can deploy activities in their educational platforms. On the other hand, learners can solve exercises and receive immediate feedback on their solutions through static and dynamic analyzers. Since we are in the early stages of implementation, the paper focus on the presentation of the LearnJS architecture, their main components and their data and integration models. Nevertheless, a prototype of the platform is available in a GitHub repository.