CRACS - Indexed Articles in Conferences

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Browsing CRACS - Indexed Articles in Conferences by Author "6251"
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    Asura: A Game-Based Assessment Environment for Mooshak (Short Paper)
    ( 2018) José Paulo Leal ; José Carlos Paiva ; 5125 ; 6251
    Learning to program is hard. Students need to remain motivated to keep practicing and to overcome their difficulties. Several approaches have been proposed to foster students’ motivation. As most people enjoy playing games of some kind and play on a regular basis, the use of games is one of the most widely spread approaches. However, taking full advantage of games to teach specific concepts of programming requires much effort. This paper presents Asura, a game-based assessment environment built on top of Mooshak that challenges students to code Software Agents (SAs) to play a game, allowing them to test the SAs against each others’ SAs and watch a movie of the test. Once the challenge development stage ends, teachers are able to organize game-like tournaments among SAs. One of the key features of Asura is that it provides a means to reduce the required effort of building game-based challenges up to that of creating traditional programming exercises. © José Carlos Paiva and José Paulo Leal.
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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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    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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    Enhancing Feedback to Students in Automated Diagram Assessment
    ( 2017) José Paulo Leal ; Helder Pina Correia ; José Carlos Paiva ; 5125 ; 6549 ; 6251
    Automated assessment is an essential part of eLearning. Although comparatively easy for multiple choice questions (MCQs), automated assessment is more challenging when exercises involve languages used in computer science. In this particular case, the assessment is more than just grading and must include feedback that leads to the improvement of the students’ performance. This paper presents ongoing work to develop Kora, an automated diagram assessment tool with enhanced feedback, targeted to the multiple diagrammatic languages used in computer science. Kora builds on the experience gained with previous research, namely: a diagram assessment tool to compute di erences between graphs; an IDE inspired web learning environment for computer science languages; and an extensible web diagram editor. Kora has several features to enhance feedback: it distinguishes syntactic and semantic errors, providing specialized feedback in each case; it provides progressive feedback disclosure, controlling the quality and quantity shown to each student after a submission; when possible, it integrates feedback within the diagram editor showing actual nodes and edges on the editor itself. © Hélder Correia, José Paulo Leal, and José Carlos Paiva
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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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    Eshu: An Extensible Web Editor for Diagrammatic Languages
    ( 2016) José Paulo Leal ; Helder Pina Correia ; José Carlos Paiva ; 5125 ; 6549 ; 6251
    The corner stone of a language development environment is an editor. For programming languages, several code editors are readily available to be integrated in Web applications. However, only few editors exist for diagrammatic languages. Eshu is an extensible diagram editor, embeddable in Web applications that require diagram interaction, such as modeling tools or e-learning environments. Eshu is a JavaScript library with an API that supports its integration with other components, including importing/exporting diagrams in JSON. Eshu was already integrated in a pedagogical environment with automated diagram assessment, configured for extended entityrelationship diagrams, that served as basis for an usability evaluation. © José Paulo Leal, Helder Correia, and José Carlos Paiva;licensed under Creative Commons License CC-BY.
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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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    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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    Improving Diagram Assessment in Mooshak
    ( 2017) José Carlos Paiva ; José Paulo Leal ; 6251 ; 5125
    Mooshak is a web system with support for assessment in computer science. It was originally developed for programming contest management but evolved to be used also as a pedagogical tool, capitalizing on its programming assessment features. The current version of Mooshak supports other forms of assessment used in computer science, such as diagram assessment. This form of assessment is supported by a set of new features, including a diagram editor, a graph comparator, and an environment for integration of pedagogical activities. The first attempt to integrate these features to support diagram assessment revealed a number of shortcomings, such as the lack of support for multiple diagrammatic languages, ineffective feedback, and usability issues. These shortcomings were addressed by the creation of a diagrammatic language definition language, the introduction of a new component for feedback summarization and a redesign of the diagram editor. This paper describes the design and implementation of these features, as well as their validation. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018.
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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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    Learning Computer Science Languages in Enki
    ( 2016) Ricardo Queirós ; José Carlos Paiva ; José Paulo Leal ; 5695 ; 6251 ; 5125
    This paper presents an overview and main features of Enki, a web-based learning environment for computer science languages. Enki was designed to be a sort of entry level IDE, aggregating tools for navigating and viewing course materials, for solving exercises and receiving automated feedback, as well as promoting the learning process. Enki uses services from several other systems, namely for content sequencing and recommendation, exercise assessment, and gamification.
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    Mooshak's Diet Update: Introducing YAPExIL Format to Mooshak (Short Paper)
    ( 2021) José Paulo Leal ; Ricardo Queirós ; José Carlos Paiva ; 5125 ; 5695 ; 6251
    Practice is pivotal in learning programming. As many other automated assessment tools for programming assignments, Mooshak has been adopted by numerous educational practitioners to support them in delivering timely and accurate feedback to students during exercise solving. These tools specialize in the delivery and assessment of blank-sheet coding questions. However, the different phases of a student's learning path may demand distinct types of exercises (e.g., bug fix and block sorting) to foster new competencies such as debugging programs and understanding unknown source code or, otherwise, to break the routine and keep engagement. Recently, a format for describing programming exercises - YAPExIL -, supporting different types of activities, has been introduced. Unfortunately, no automated assessment tool yet supports this novel format. This paper describes a JavaScript library to transform YAPExIL packages into Mooshak problem packages (i.e., MEF format), keeping support for all exercise types. Moreover, its integration in an exercise authoring tool is described.
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    Moozz: Assessment of Quizzes in Mooshak 2.0 (Short Paper)
    ( 2018) José Carlos Paiva ; José Paulo Leal ; 6251 ; 5125
    Quizzes are a widely used form of assessment, supported in many e-learning systems. Mooshak is a web system which supports automated assessment in computer science. This paper presents Moozz, a quiz assessment environment for Mooshak 2.0, with its own XML definition for describing quizzes. This definition is used for: interoperability with different e-learning systems, generating HTML-based forms, storing student answers, marking final submissions and generating feedback. Furthermore, Moozz also includes an authoring tool for creating quizzes. The paper describes Moozz, its quiz definition language and architecture, and details its implementation. © Hélder Correia, José Paulo Leal and José Carlos Paiva.
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    Odin: A Service for Gamification of Learning Activities
    ( 2015) José Paulo Leal ; José Carlos Paiva ; Ricardo Queirós ; 5125 ; 6251 ; 5695
    Existing gamification services have features that preclude their use by e-learning tools. Odin is a gamification service that mimics the API of state-of-the-art services without these limitations. This paper describes Odin, its role in an e-learning system architecture requiring gamification, and details its implementation. The validation of Odin involved the creation of a small e-learning game, integrated in a Learning Management System (LMS) using the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) specification.
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    An Open-Source Gamified Programming Learning Environment (Short Paper)
    ( 2021) José Paulo Leal ; Ricardo Queirós ; José Carlos Paiva ; 5125 ; 5695 ; 6251
    The importance of e-learning tools facilitating the process of learning to program is growing, especially as the pandemic-caused lockdown enforced distance learning in many countries. The key success factor in this process is the provision of an instant and relevant feedback to students. In this paper, we describe a novel open-source programming learning environment featuring automatic assessment of students' solutions and customized gamification. This environment has been developed as a part of the FGPE framework. © José Carlos Paiva, Ricardo Queirós, José Paulo Leal, Jakub Swacha, and Filip Miernik; licensed under Creative Commons License CC-BY 4.0 Second International Computer Programming Education Conference (ICPEC 2021).
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    Programming Exercises Interoperability: The Case of a Non-Picky Consumer
    ( 2021) José Carlos Paiva ; Ricardo Queirós ; José Paulo Leal ; 6251 ; 5695 ; 5125
    Problem-solving is considered one of the most important skills to retain in the coming decades for building a modern and proactive society. In this realm, computer programming learning is vital to enrich those skills. Practicing in this area boils down to solve programming exercises. In order to foster this practice, it is necessary to provide students with the best of the breed automated tools and a good set of exercises in a fair quantity covering the curricula of a typical programming course. Despite the increasing appearance of automated tools such as program evaluators, gamification engines and sophisticated web environments, access to exercises remains problematic. In fact, although the existence of several code repositories (most for feed computer programming contests), the majority of them store the exercises in proprietary formats and without any access facilities hindering their use. This leaves no other option to teachers but to manually create programming exercises which is time-consuming and error prone, or simply, reuse the same exercises, from previous years, which is considered as a detrimental and limiting approach to enhance multi-faceted and creative programmers. The article surveys the current interoperability efforts on programming exercises, more precisely, in terms of serialization formats and communication protocols. This study will sustain the selection of an API to feed a code playground called LearnJS with random programming exercises.
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    Raccode: An Eclipse Plugin for Assessment of Programming Exercises (Short Paper)
    ( 2018) José Paulo Leal ; José Carlos Paiva ; 5125 ; 6251
    IDEs are environments specialized in support during the development of programs. They contain several utilities to code, run, debug, and deploy programs quickly. However, they do not provide the automatic assessment of programming exercises, which is required in both learning and competitive programming environment. Therefore, IDEs are often underestimated in these contexts and replaced by basic code editors. Yet, IDEs have unique features which are essential for programmers, such as the debugger or the package explorer. This paper presents Raccode, a plugin for assessment of programming exercises in Eclipse. This plugin integrates with Mooshak to combine the diverse capabilities of an IDE, like Eclipse, with the automatic evaluation of exercises, clarification requests, printouts, balloons, and rankings. It can be used both in competitive and learning environments. The paper describes Raccode, its concept, architecture and design. © André Silva, José Paulo Leal, and José Carlos Paiva.
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    A Roadmap to Gamify Programming Education
    ( 2020) José Paulo Leal ; José Carlos Paiva ; Ricardo Queirós ; 5125 ; 6251 ; 5695
    Learning programming relies on practicing it which is often hampered by the barrier of difficulty. The combined use of automated assessment, which provides fast feedback to the students experimenting with their code, and gamification, which provides additional motivation for the students to intensify their learning effort, can help pass the barrier of difficulty in learning programming. In such environment, students keep receiving the relevant feedback no matter how many times they try (thanks to automated assessment), and their engagement is retained (thanks to gamification). While there is a number of open software and programming exercise collections supporting automated assessment, up to this date, there are no available open collections of gamified programming exercises, no open interactive programming learning environment that would support such exercises, and even no open standard for the representation of such exercises so that they could be developed in different educational institutions and shared among them. This gap is addressed by Framework for Gamified Programming Education (FGPE), an international project whose primary objective is to provide necessary prerequisites for the application of gamification to programming education, including a dedicated gamification scheme, a gamified exercise format and exercises conforming to it, software for editing the exercises and an interactive learning environment capable of presenting them to students. This paper presents the FGPE project, its architecture and main components, as well as the results achieved so far. 2012 ACM Subject Classification Social and professional topics ! Computer science education.
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    Yet Another Programming Exercises Interoperability Language (Short Paper)
    ( 2020) Ricardo Queirós ; José Carlos Paiva ; José Paulo Leal ; 5695 ; 6251 ; 5125
    This paper introduces Yet Another Programming Exercises Interoperability Language (YAPExIL), a JSON format that aims to: (1) support several kinds of programming exercises behind traditional blank sheet activities; (2) capitalize on expressiveness and interoperability to constitute a strong candidate to standard open programming exercises format. To this end, it builds upon an existing open format named PExIL, by mitigating its weaknesses and extending its support for a handful of exercise types. YAPExIL is published as an open format, independent from any commercial vendor, and supported with dedicated open-source software.