CRACS - Indexed Articles in Conferences

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Browsing CRACS - Indexed Articles in Conferences by Author "5695"
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    Authoring Game-Based Programming Challenges to Improve Students’ Motivation
    ( 2020) José Paulo Leal ; José Carlos Paiva ; Ricardo Queirós ; 5125 ; 6251 ; 5695
    One 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. © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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    Computing Semantic Relatedness using DBPedia
    ( 2012) José Paulo Leal ; Ricardo Queirós ; 5125 ; 5695
    Extracting the semantic relatedness of terms is an important topic in several areas, including data mining, information retrieval and web recommendation. This paper presents an approach for computing the semantic relatedness of terms using the knowledge base of DBpedia - a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia. Several approaches to extract semantic relatedness from Wikipedia using bag-of-words vector models are already available in the literature. The research presented in this paper explores a novel approach using paths on an ontological graph extracted from DBpedia. It is based on an algorithm for finding and weighting a collection of paths connecting concept nodes. This algorithm was implemented on a tool called Shakti that extract relevant ontological data for a given domain from DBpedia using its SPARQL endpoint. To validate the proposed approach Shakti was used to recommend web pages on a Portuguese social site related to alternative music and the results of that experiment are reported in this paper.
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    CrimsonHex: A Service Oriented Repository of Specialised Learning Objects
    ( 2009) Ricardo Queirós ; José Paulo Leal ; 5695 ; 5125
    The corner stone of the interoperability of eLearning systems is the standard definition of learning objects. Nevertheless, for some domains this standard is insufficient to fully describe all the assets, especially when they are used as input for other eLearning services. On the other hand, a standard definition of learning objects in not enough to ensure interoperability among eLearning systems; they must also use a standard API to exchange learning objects. This paper presents the design and implementation of a service oriented repository of learning objects called crimsonHex. This repository is fully compliant with the existing interoperability standards and supports new definitions of learning objects for specialized domains. We illustrate this feature with the definition of programming problems as learning objects and its validation by the repository. This repository is also prepared to store usage data on learning objects to tailor the presentation order and adapt it to learner profiles.
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    CrimsonHex: A Service Oriented Repository of Specialised Learning Objects
    ( 2009) Ricardo Queirós ; José Paulo Leal ; 5695 ; 5125
    The corner stone of the interoperability of eLearning systems is the standard definition of learning objects. Nevertheless, for some domains this standard is insufficient to fully describe all the assets, especially when they are used as input for other eLearning services. On the other hand, a standard definition of learning objects in not enough to ensure interoperability among eLearning systems; they must also use a standard API to exchange learning objects. This paper presents the design and implementation of a service oriented repository of learning objects called crimsonHex. This repository is fully compliant with the existing interoperability standards and supports new definitions of learning objects for specialized domains. We illustrate this feature with the definition of programming problems as learning objects and its validation by the repository. This repository is also prepared to store usage data on learning objects to tailor the presentation order and adapt it to learner profiles.
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    Defining Requirements for a Gamified Programming Exercises Format
    ( 2019) José Carlos Paiva ; Ricardo Queirós ; José Paulo Leal ; 6251 ; 5695 ; 5125
    Computer programming is a complex domain both to teach and learn. This incited endeavors to find methods that could mitigate at least some of the existing barriers. In the last years, automatic assessment has been playing an important role in reducing the burden of teachers in the assessment of students' attempts to solve programming exercises and fostering the autonomy of students by 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 and engagement of students. Despite its rising spread, until now, there is not a programming exercise specification format addressing the needs of gamification, such as the definition of challenges, the underlying storyline, including the links to other exercises, or the rewards for solving challenges in form of points, badges or virtual items. Such a data format would allow the exchange of ready-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 defining gamification rules themselves. In this paper, we analyze a set of concepts related to programming gamification developed in our previous work to identify the requirements for the specification of a gamified exercise format. (C) 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.
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    Design of an extensible metadata editor based on RDF
    ( 2010) José Paulo Leal ; Ricardo Queirós ; 5125 ; 5695
    The content of a Learning Object is frequently characterized by metadata from several standards, such as LOM, SCORM and QTI. Specialized domains require new application profiles that further complicate the task of editing the metadata of learning object since their data models are not supported by existing authoring tools. To cope with this problem we designed a metadata editor supporting multiple metadata languages, each with its own data model. It is assumed that the supported languages have an XML binding and we use RDF to create a common metadata representation, independent from the syntax of each metadata languages. The combined data model supported by the editor is defined as an ontology. Thus, the process of extending the editor to support a new metadata language is twofold: firstly, the conversion from the XML binding of the metadata language to RDF and vice-versa; secondly, the extension of the ontology to cover the new metadata model. In this paper we describe the general architecture of the editor, we explain how a typical metadata language for learning objects is represented as an ontology, and how this formalization captures all the data required to generate the graphical user interface of the editor.
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    Designing a user interface for repositories of learning objects
    ( 2009) José Paulo Leal ; Ricardo Queirós ; 5125 ; 5695
    This paper presents the design of a user interface for repositories of learning objects. It integrates several tasks, such as submission, browse, search, and comment/review of learning objects, on a single screen layout. This design is being implemented on the web front-end of crimsonHex, a repository of specialized learning objects, developed as part of the EduJudge, a European project that aims to bring automatic evaluation of programming problems to e-Learning systems. © 2009 IADIS.
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    ELEARNING FRAMEWORKS: A SURVEY
    ( 2010) Ricardo Queirós ; José Paulo Leal ; 5695 ; 5125
    In recent years the concept of eLearning Framework emerged associated with several initiatives promoted by educational organizations. These initiatives share a common goal: to create flexible learning environments by integrating heterogeneous systems already available in many educational institutions. The paper provides an introductory survey on eLearning Frameworks. It gathers information on these initiatives categorizes them and compares their features regarding a set of predefined criteria such as: architecture, business model, primary user groups, technical implementations, adopted standards, maturity and future development.
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    Enki: A Pedagogical Services Aggregator for Learning Programming Languages
    ( 2016) José Paulo Leal ; Ricardo Queirós ; José Carlos Paiva ; 5125 ; 5695 ; 6251
    This paper presents Enki, a web-based IDE that integrates several pedagogical tools designed to engage students in learning programming languages. Enki achieves this goal (1) by sequencing educational resources, either expository or evaluative, (2) by using gamification services to entice students to solve activities, (3) by promoting social interaction and (4) by helping students with activities, providing feedback on submitted solutions. The paper describes Enki, its concept and architecture, details its design and implementation, and covers also its validation.
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    An Example-Based Generator of XSLT Programs
    ( 2013) José Paulo Leal ; Ricardo Queirós ; 5125 ; 5695
    XSLT is a powerful and widely used language for transforming XML documents. However, its power and complexity can be overwhelming for novice or infrequent users, many of whom simply give up on using this language. On the other hand, many XSLT programs of practical use are simple enough to be automatically inferred from examples of source and target documents. An inferred XSLT program is seldom adequate for production usage but can be used as a skeleton of the final program, or at least as scaffolding in the process of coding it. It should be noted that the authors do not claim that XSLT programs, in general, can be inferred from examples. The aim of Vishnu-the XSLT generator engine described in this chapter-is to produce XSLT programs for processing documents similar to the given examples and with enough readability to be easily understood by a programmer not familiar with the language. The architecture of Vishnu is composed by a graphical editor and a programming engine. In this chapter, the authors focus on the editor as a GWT Web application where the programmer loads and edits document examples and pairs their content using graphical primitives. The programming engine receives the data collected by the editor and produces an XSLT program. Copyright (C) 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
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    FGPE AuthorKit - A Tool for Authoring Gamified Programming Educational Content
    ( 2020) José Paulo Leal ; José Carlos Paiva ; Ricardo Queirós ; 5125 ; 6251 ; 5695
    We present FGPE AuthorKit, a tool to author programming exercises featuring gamification elements that provide additional motivation for the students to intensify their learning effort. The tool allows the (1) creation of exercises and their associated metadata, (2) selection and parameterization of adequate gamification techniques for a specific exercise or their collection, (3) design of the content structure and sequencing rules, and (4) importing and exporting the content in the formats of choice. © 2020 ACM.
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    FGPE Gamification Service: A GraphQL Service to Gamify Online Education
    ( 2021) José Paulo Leal ; José Carlos Paiva ; Ricardo Queirós ; 5125 ; 6251 ; 5695
    Keeping students engaged while learning programming is becoming more and more imperative. Of the several proposed techniques, gamification is presumably the most widely studied and has already proven as an effective means to engage students. However, there is a complete lack of public and customizable solutions to gamified programming education that can be reused with personalized rules and learning material. FGPE Gamification Service (FGPE GS) is an open-source GraphQL service that transforms a package containing the gamification layer – adhering to a dedicated open-source language, GEdIL – into a game. The game provides students with a gamified experience leveraging on the automatically-assessable activities referenced by the challenges. This paper presents FGPE GS, its architecture, data model, and validation. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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    Fostering Students-Driven Learning of Computer Programming with an Ensemble of E-Learning Tools
    ( 2018) José Paulo Leal ; Ricardo Queirós ; 5125 ; 5695
    Learning 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. © Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018.
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    Game-Based Coding Challenges to Foster Programming Practice
    ( 2020) Ricardo Queirós ; José Carlos Paiva ; José Paulo Leal ; 5695 ; 6251 ; 5125
    The practice is the crux of learning to program. Automated assessment plays a key role in enabling timely feedback without access to teachers but alone is insufficient to engage students and maximize the outcome of their practice. Graphical feedback and game-thinking promote positive effects on students' motivation as shown by some serious programming games, but those games are complex to create and adapt. This paper presents Asura, an environment for assessment of game-based coding challenges, built on a specialized framework, in which students are invited to develop a software agent (SA) to play it. During the coding phase, students can take advantage of the graphical feedback to complete the proposed task. Some challenges also encourage students to think of a SA that plays in a setting with interaction among SAs. In such a case, the environment supports the creation and visualization of tournaments among submitted agents. Furthermore, the validation of this environment from the learners' perspective is also described. 2012 ACM Subject Classification Applied computing ! Interactive learning environments; Applied computing ! E-learning.
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    Integrating Rich Learning Applications in LMS
    ( 2016) José Paulo Leal ; Ricardo Queirós ; José Carlos Paiva ; 5125 ; 5695 ; 6251
    Currently, a learning management system (LMS) plays a central role in any e-learning environment. These environments include systems to handle the pedagogic aspects of the teaching-learning process (e.g. specialized tutors, simulation games) and the academic aspects (e.g. academic management systems). Thus, the potential for interoperability is an important, although over looked, aspect of an LMS. In this paper, we make a comparative study of the interoperability level of the most relevant LMS. We start by defining an application and a specification model. For the application model, we create a basic application that acts as a tool provider for LMS integration. The specification model acts as the API that the LMS should implement to communicate with the tool provider. Based on researches, we select the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) from IMS. Finally, we compare the LMS interoperability level defined as the effort made to integrate the application on the study LMS.
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    Integration of Computer Science Assessment into Learning Management Systems with JuezLTI
    ( 2022) Ricardo Queirós ; José Paulo Leal ; 5695 ; 5125
    Computer science is a skill that will continue to be in high demand in the foreseeable future. Despite this trend, automated assessment in computer science is often hampered by the lack of systems supporting a wide range of topics. While there is a number of open software systems and programming exercise collections supporting automated assessment, up to this date, there are few systems that offer a diversity of exercises ranging from computer programming exercises to markup and databases languages. At the same time, most of the best-of-breed solutions force teachers and students to alternate between the Learning Management System - a pivotal piece of the e-learning ecosystem - and the tool providing the exercises. This issue is addressed by JuezLTI, an international project whose goal is to create an innovative tool to allow the automatic assessment of exercises in a wide range of computer science topics. These topics include different languages used in computer science for programming, markup, and database management. JuezLTI borrows part of its name from the IMS Learning Tools Interoperability (IMS LTI) standard. With this standard, the tool will interoperate with reference systems such as Moodle, Sakai, Canvas, or Blackboard, among many others. Another contribution of JuezLTI will be a pool of exercises. Interoperability and content are expected to foster the adoption of JuezLTI by many institutions. This paper presents the JuezLTI project, its architecture, and its main components. © Carrillo, Juan V.; Sierra, Alberto; Leal, Jose Paulo; Queirs, Ricardo; Pellicer, Salvador; Primo, Marco; licensed under Creative Commons License CC-BY 4.0
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    Integration of e-Learning Systems With Repositories of Learning Objects
    ( 2008) Ricardo Queirós ; José Paulo Leal ; 5695 ; 5125
    This paper describes a communication model to integrate repositories of programming problems with other e-Learning software components. The motivation for this work comes from the EduJudge project that aims to connect an existing repository of programming problems to learning management systems. When trying to use the existing repositories of learning objects we realized that they are mainly specialized search engines and lack features for integration with other e-Learning systems. With this model we intend to clarify the main features of a programming problem repository, in order to enable the design and development of software components that use it. The two main points of this model are the definition of programming problems as learning objects and the definition of the core functions exposed by the repository. In both cases, this model follows the existing specifications of the IMS standard and proposes extensions to deal with the special requirements of automatic evaluation and grading of programming exercises. In the definition of programming problems as learning objects we introduced a new schema for meta-data. This schema is used to represent meta-data related to automatic evaluation that cannot be conveniently represented using the standard: the type of automatic evaluation; the requirements of the evaluation engine; or the roles of different assets - tests cases, program solutions, etc. In the definition of the core functions we used two different web services flavours - SOAP and REST - and described each function as an operation for each type of interface. We describe also the data types of the arguments of each operation. These data types consist mainly on learning objects and their identifications, but include also usage reports and queries using XQuery.
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    Integration of ePortfolios in Learning Management Systems
    ( 2011) Ricardo Queirós ; José Paulo Leal ; 5695 ; 5125
    The LMS plays a decisive role in most eLearning environments. Although they integrate many useful tools for managing eLearning activities, they must also be effectively integrated with other specialized systems typically found in an educational environment such as Repositories of Learning Objects or ePortfolio Systems. Both types of systems evolved separately but in recent years the trend is to combine them, allowing the LMS to benefit from using the ePortfolio assessment features. This paper details the most common strategies for integrating an ePortfolio system into an LMS: the data, the API and the tool integration strategies. It presents a comparative study of strategies based on the technical skills, degree of coupling, security features, batch integration, development effort, status and standardization. This study is validated through the integration of two of the most representative systems on each category - respectively Mahara and Moodle.
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    INTEGRATION OF REPOSITORIES IN ELEARNING SYSTEMS
    ( 2010) José Paulo Leal ; Ricardo Queirós ; 5125 ; 5695
    The wide acceptance of digital repositories today in the eLearning field raises several interoperability issues. In this paper we present the interoperability features of a service oriented repository of learning objects called crimsonHex. These features are compliant with the existing standards and we propose extensions to the IMS interoperability recommendation, adding new functions, formalizing message interchange and providing also a REST interface. To validate the proposed extensions and its implementation in crimsonHex we developed a repository plugin for Moodle 2.0 that is expected to be included in the next release of this popular learning management system.
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    INTEGRATION OF REPOSITORIES IN ELEARNING SYSTEMS
    ( 2010) José Paulo Leal ; Ricardo Queirós ; 5125 ; 5695
    The wide acceptance of digital repositories today in the eLearning field raises several interoperability issues. In this paper we present the interoperability features of a service oriented repository of learning objects called crimsonHex. These features are compliant with the existing standards and we propose extensions to the IMS interoperability recommendation, adding new functions, formalizing message interchange and providing also a REST interface. To validate the proposed extensions and its implementation in crimsonHex we developed a repository plugin for Moodle 2.0 that is expected to be included in the next release of this popular learning management system.