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.
Highlights
Motivation is what triggers and supports the learning process
This primary stimulus does not last too long and typically vanishes after the initial difficulties and failures. This loss of motivation is arguably the most prominent concern in programming education nowadays since learning to program is difficult [1] and novice programmers are daunted by the complexity of the domain, which requires a correct understanding of abstract concepts as well as the development of practical skills, such as logical thinking, problem-solving, and debugging [2,3]
This paper introduces Asura, an automated assessment environment for game-based coding challenges, which seeks to promote students’ motivation, requiring teachers to make an effort comparable to that of creating traditional programming problems
Summary
Motivation is what triggers and supports the learning process. Undergraduate students enroll in a new course eager to know more about or start a career in a specific area. This primary stimulus does not last too long and typically vanishes after the initial difficulties and failures This loss of motivation is arguably the most prominent concern in programming education nowadays since learning to program is difficult [1] and novice programmers are daunted by the complexity of the domain, which requires a correct understanding of abstract concepts as well as the development of practical skills, such as logical thinking, problem-solving, and debugging [2,3]. This paper presents Asura, an automated assessment environment for game-based coding challenges, which aims to foster programming practice by delivering engaging programming assignments to students. These assignments challenge students to code a program that acts as a game player (i.e., an SA) providing graphical feedback with the game simulation.
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