Defining Requirements for a Gamified Programming Exercises Format

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.