A model for gamifying programming education: University-level programming course quantified

Abstract

<p>Utilizing gamification in course holistically requires that all areas of the course can be quantified, and the progress made transparent to students as well. However, keeping track of all students' scores, submissions and other tasks can be too big of a workload to be practical, especially in the larger courses. We have successfully adapted a collaborative education tool to university-level programming courses. The tool is used to record student performance in all areas of the course, including for example attendances, demonstration and tutorial scores, weekly surveys and additional exercises. In addition to providing comprehensive statistics to teachers, all progress is also visible to students in real time. In this paper, we describe the redesign of the course, with gamification and transparency to students in focus. Moreover, we analyze students' scores in different components of the course, and find out if there are correlations to be found between different areas. The results seem to indicate, that methods emphasizing active learning are the most beneficial for students' performance in the course.<br /></p>