José Carlos Paiva

Abstract
E-learning tools are gaining increasing relevance as facilitators in the task of learning how to program. This is mainly a result of the pandemic situation and consequent lockdown in several countries, which forced distance learning. Instant and relevant feedback to students, particularly if coupled with gamification, plays a pivotal role in this process and has already been demonstrated as an effective solution in this regard. However, teachers still struggle with the lack of tools that can adequately support the creation and management of online gamified programming courses. Until now, there was no software platform that would be simultaneously open-source and general-purpose (i.e., not integrated with a specific course on a specific programming language) while featuring a meaningful selection of gamification components. Such a solution has been developed as a part of the Framework for Gamified Programming Education (FGPE) project. In this paper, we present its two front-end components: FGPE AuthorKit and FGPE PLE, explain how they can be used by teachers to prepare and manage gamified programming courses, and report the results of the usability evaluation by the teachers using the platform in their classes.

Abstract
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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