CodePlay: uma plataforma que incorpora a ludicidade de jogos de entretenimento a um juiz on-line

Abstract

According to the scientific literature, maintaining students’ interest and engagement in CS1 courses is a major challenge. The high complexity of the course content and the delay in the exercises resolution feedbacks are some of the problems. To improve feedback to the students, many educational institutions have adopted online judge systems. However, such systems alone cannot solve students’ lack of interest and engagement, which has motivated new researches to mitigate this problem. In this sense, one of the most studied alternatives by researchers are games, serious games, and gamification. Thus, this Ph.D. thesis aims to increase the interest and engagement of CS1 students by integrating a game called CodePlay to the automatic feedback mechanism of online judges, where the students need to solve the programming exercises to be able to progress in the game. To validate CodePlay, preliminary studies were carried out with game specialists and CS1 students. Questionnaire responses and system logs records were analyzed to identify players’ perceptions of CodePlay. As a result, the answers to the questionnaires indicate that the game is promising and can help to stimulate student engagement. Additionally, the analysis of the logs showed that students with different player profiles have preferences for different game elements, indicating the need to consider such differences to increase the engagement of all students, regardless of their profiles. Student performance is measured through assessment averages. The results indicate that the classes that used the gamified online judge (𝑀e = 8.24; 𝐸𝑆 = 0.281; 𝑝 < 0.001) performed better when compared to the classes that used the judge online without gamition (𝑀e = 7.0). Metrics that measure engagement indicate that there is also a statistically significant difference between the group that used the gamified online judge and the group that used it without gamification. When we analyzed the average of the grades of practical assignments, students who used the gamified online judge (𝑀e = 9.12; 𝐸𝑆 = 0.395; 𝑝 < 0.001) performed better than students who did not use gamification (𝑀e = 7.85). The procrastination index, which measures the anticipation with which the students started to code the exercises, also showed a significant difference between the two groups, with the classes that used gamification (𝑀e = 0.517; 𝑑 = 0.482; 𝑝 = 0.006) started earlier to solve the exercises, when compared to the classes without gamification (𝑀e = 0.585).