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An Empirical Investigation on the Benefits of Gamification in Programming Courses

Published: 20 November 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Context: Programming courses are compulsory for most engineering degrees, but students’ performance on these courses is often not as good as expected. Programming is difficult for students to learn, given that it includes a lot of new, complex, and abstract topics. All of this has led experts to the conclusion that new teaching techniques are required if students are to be motivated and engaged in learning on programming courses. Gamification has come to be an effective technique in education in general, and is especially useful in programming courses. This motivated us to develop an open source gamified platform, called UDPiler, for use in a programming course.
Objective: The main goal of this article is to obtain empirical evidence on the improvement of students’ learning performance when using UDPiler in comparison to a non-gamified compiler.
Method: A quasi-experiment was performed with two groups of first-year engineering students at Diego Portales University in Chile, using a non-gamified compiler and a gamified platform, respectively.
Results: The results reveal that the students obtained better marks when the gamified platform was used to learn C programming. In addition, there is statistical significance in favor of there being a positive effect on the learning performance of those students who used the gamified platform.
Conclusions: The results allow us to conclude that gamification is an encouraging approach with which to teach C programming, a finding that is aligned with previous empirical studies concerning gamification on programming courses, carried out in academic contexts. Nonetheless, we are aware that further validation is also required to corroborate and strengthen the findings obtained and to investigate whether the kind of gamified elements (mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics) used have any influence on students’ performance, among other issues that deserve further investigation and that are explained throughout this article.

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cover image ACM Transactions on Computing Education
ACM Transactions on Computing Education  Volume 19, Issue 1
March 2019
156 pages
EISSN:1946-6226
DOI:10.1145/3282284
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 20 November 2018
Accepted: 01 June 2018
Revised: 01 May 2018
Received: 01 May 2017
Published in TOCE Volume 19, Issue 1

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Author Tags

  1. Gamification
  2. programming courses
  3. quasi-experiment
  4. undergraduate education

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  • Research-article
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  • Refereed

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  • SEQUOIA Project
  • ENSE
  • Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional and Ministerio de Economíay Competitividad
  • Consejería de Educación, Cultura y Deportes de la Dirección General de Universidades, Investigación e Innovación de la JCCM.
  • CONICYT

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  • (2024)Applying a New Game Element Called Backward Grading For Student EngagementApplying a new game element called backward grading for student engagementRevista Educación en Ingeniería10.26507/rei.v19n37.127819:37(1-8)Online publication date: 16-Jan-2024
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