Abstract
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.

Abstract
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.

Abstract
The goal of the Semantic Web is to allow the software agents around us and AIs to extract information from the Internet as easily as humans do. This semantic web is a network of connected graphs, where relations between concepts and entities make up a layout that is very easy for machines to navigate. At the moment, there are only a few tools that enable humans to navigate this new layer of the Internet, and those that exist are for the most part very specialized tools that require from the user a lot of pre-existing knowledge about the technologies behind this structure. In this article we report on the development of DAOLOT, a search engine that allows users with no previous knowledge of the semantic web to take full advantage of its information network. This paper presents its design, the algorithm behind it and the results of the validation testing conducted with users. The results of our validation testing show that DAOLOT is useful and intuitive to users, even those without any previous knowledge of the field, and provides curated information from multiple sources instantly about any topic.

Abstract
To study how emotions affect people in expressive writing, scientists require tools to aid them in their research. The researchers at M-BW use an Experiment Management System, called HandSpy to store and analyze the hand-written productions of participants. The input is stored as digital ink and then displayed on a web-based interface. To assist the project, HandSpy integrates with new sources of information to help researchers visualize the link between psychophysiological data and written input. The newly acquired data is synchronized with the existing burst-pause interval model and represented on the user interface of the platform together with the already existing information.

Abstract
A learning path is the implementation of a curriculum design. It consists of a set of learning activities that help users achieve particular learning goals. Personalizing these paths became a significant task due to differences in users' limitations, backgrounds, goals, etc. Since the last decade, researchers have proposed a variety of learning path personalization methods using different techniques and approaches. In this paper, we present an overview of the methods that are applied to personalize learning paths as well as their advantages and disadvantages. The main parameters for personalizing learning paths are also described. In addition, we present approaches that are used to evaluate path personalization methods. Finally, we highlight the most significant challenges of these methods, which need to be tackled in order to enhance the quality of the personalization.

Abstract
Loss of motivation is one of the most prominent concerns in programming education as it negatively impacts time dedicated to practice, which is crucial for novice programmers. Of the distinct techniques introduced in the literature to engage students, gamification, is likely the most widely explored and fruitful. Game elements that intrinsically motivate students, such as graphical feedback and game-thinking, reveal more reliable long-term positive effects, but those involve significant development effort. This paper proposes a game-based assessment environment for programming challenges, built on top of a specialized framework, in which students develop a program to control the player, henceforth called Software Agent (SA). During the coding phase, students can resort to the graphical feedback demonstrating how the game unfolds to improve their programs and complete the proposed tasks. This environment also promotes competition through competitive evaluation and tournaments among SAs, optionally organized at the end by the teacher. Moreover, the validation of the effectiveness of Asura in increasing undergraduate students' motivation and, consequently, the practice of programming is reported.