Proposal of a gamified virtual learning environment

for computer programming courses

Andrés F. Pineda-Corcho Julián Moreno-Cadavid
Universidad Nacional de Colombia Universidad Nacional de Colombia
Medellín, Colombia Unal - GUIAME
afpinedac@unal.edu.co Medellín, Colombia
jmoreno1@unal.edu.co

Abstract—Many computer science teachers would agree that CodingGame https://www.codingame.com

programming is as much science as it is art. Therefore, a lot of
practice is needed to become a good programmer. Within this
context, we present in this paper a virtual learning environment
called TICademia, which is based on two main approaches:
gamification on one side, and competitive programming on the
other. We describe its main features and present a brief
comparison with several existing alternatives.
Keywords—computer sciences, computer programming,
competitive programming; gamification; virtual learning
environments
I. INTRODUCTION
There is a lot of evidence about the low performance of
college students after completing the first computer
programming course [1]. And it is because learning this subject
is considered one of the seven major challenges of computing
[2]. In fact, numerous authors [3-7] have identified and
classified the major challenges and problems faced by the
students in programming courses: a) Teaching methods, b)
Studying methods, c) The nature of programming itself, and d)
Psychological and social effects.
This may be due to the fact that, in general, programming
courses are considered highly difficult by students who often
have problems in understanding related concepts, mainly
because these are abstract and unfamiliar to them.
Unfortunately, traditional teaching methods do not deal too
well with this phenomenon.
II. RELATED WORKS
Several projects have appeared in the last few years in order
to enrich computer programming courses and most of them
share a couple of characteristics. On one hand, they allow for
direct experiential learning, i.e. they confront students with
coding problems that are assessed by some platform. On the
other hand, such platforms try to trigger motivation among
students using one or several gamification elements. Some
popular examples of those projects are presented in Table 1.
TABLE I. POPULAR PLATFORMS FOR LEARNING PROGRAMMING
Platform URL
Codecademy https://www.codecademy.com
Codeschool https://www.codeschool.com
Treehouse https://teamtreehouse.com
Checkio https://checkio.org
CodeHunt https://www.codehunt.com
III. PROPOSAL
Similar to the projects mentioned before, we propose
TICademia, a gamified virtual learning environment for
programming courses based on coding exercises and, more
specifically, on competitive programming. All of this with the
idea to solve a research problem: How encourage to the
students to program more and do it well?
A. Competitive Programming
Which is the best way to learn computer programming?
Well, programming! Even if that may sound kind of silly, there
is nothing more accurate. TICademia exploits this, presenting a
lot of problems to students who must solve them by coding a
solution. Such problems follow the ACM-ICPC standard [8]
and look for promoting competitive programming [9].
Once a student sends a code in a specific programming
language (we support Java and C++ for the time being), the
TICademia server compiles, executes and evaluates the
correctness of the code testing its solution against a set of
hidden input/output cases and then it presents the
corresponding feedback to the student. Such feedback may be
one of the options presented in Table 2.
TABLE II. PROBLEM FEEDBACK
Result Description
Accepted The algorithm output coded by the student matches with
the response stored in the server.
Compilation
It is generated when the code was not able to be compiled
Error
It is generated when an exception occurs during the
Runtime error
execution of the algorithm
Time Limit It is generated when the algorithm exceed the maximum
exceeded time of execution proposed for the problem
It is generated when the algorithm output does not match
Wrong answer
with the response stored in the server
It is important to remark that from the five possible
responses provided as feedback by the judge, only the
‘Accepted’ is considered correct. It means that the student has
coded an algorithm that passes all the hidden test cases and it
has an acceptable execution time. An incorrect answer, on the

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other hand, means that the student has failed to code an
algorithm that takes into account all possible cases. This
involves the students in a culture of testing deeply the
algorithms with different inputs and extreme cases to determine
their behavior.
B. Gamification
As the general model for gamification, we use the MDA
model (Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics) defined by Hunicke
et al. [10]. The mechanics are a set of rules that attempt to
generate activities to enjoy. They are supposed to produce a
certain type of 'addiction' and commitment from users. The
dynamics are the global aspects that a system should be
oriented to, i.e., it is related to the purposes, motivations, and
desires of the users. Finally, the aesthetics describe the Fig. 2. Individual Ranking
emotional effect that is expected to occur when the users are
interacting with the game. TICademia implements all the Badges: They are gained when the student reaches some
Mechanics in order to generate the Aesthetics in the users specific goals during the progress of the course, for example
through the Dynamics. These are: solving a certain number of exercises. Table 3 presents the
categories of the achievements implemented.
Points: They allow students for being rewarded according
to several actions in the platform, either solving an exercise or TABLE III. ACHIEVEMENTS
reaching an achievement. Fig. 1 shows how points are
Type Objective
visualized for each of the exercises in a course module. Problems Encourages to complete all the problems
in the course
Efficiency Encourages to find the best way to solve
a problem
Materials usage Encourages students to study all the
materials in order to get the theoretical
knowledge before resolving the
exercises.
Wall, forums and social networks Encourages interaction with other
students
Duels Encourages competition among students
Platform usage Encourages the student to keep studying

Levels: They allow to classify students based on their

progress in the course. Levels defined in TICademia are
presented in Table 4.

TABLE IV. LEVELS

Level Percentage of
progress
Zombie 0%
Beginner (Principiante) >0%, <=10%
Fig. 1. Course module interface Pupil (Pupilo) >10%, <=20%
Apprentice (Aprendiz) >20%, <=35%
Ranking: This is a way for quantifying general student’s Initiated (Iniciado) >35%, <=50%
Connoisseur (Conocedor) >50%, <=65%
performance, and it is based on gained points. TICademia has Maestro (Maestro) >65%, <=80%
three types of rankings: individual (all the students in the Wise (Sabio) >80%, >=90%
course), friends, and group. Fig. 1 shows an example of the Erudite (Erudito) >90%, <100%
individual ranking. God of wisdom (Dios de la sapiencia) 3 completed courses

C. Other features
It is important to mention that TICademia, as a virtual
learning environment, also has support for the teacher’s role. In
this case, a teacher can navigate the course in the exact same
manner as a student but with some management tools. One of
these tools enables the teacher to create surveys. In this way,
teachers may create questions in order to know students’

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opinions about -for example- the content, the problems, and the
course in general. The idea is that this works as feedback for
future courses. Another tool is the statistics interface which
shows in a graphical way some metrics that allow the teacher
to know the overall progress of the students in the course. Fig.
3 presents an example of such an interface.
Other important features within the platform which are
important to mention –since all of them point to increase the
effectiveness of the strategies selected- are:
x Forum: It facilitates students to ask and provide ideas
about a particular exercise within the course.
x Friends: There is the possibility to add friends or import
them from Facebook in order to use certain features on
the platform.
x Real-time Chat: This feature allows students to have
real-time conversations with classmates, tutors or
teachers.
x Chat Rooms: Teachers and instructors can create chat
rooms using Google Hangouts in order to carry out
monitoring practice sessions and resolution of doubts.
x Wall posts: It contains a list of publications and
activities done by all the students in the course
Fig. 3. Stats interface
x Notifications: This is one of the main features within
the platform, allowing students to be aware of the
activities of other students. In the Fig. 4 is presented an
example of notifications displayed in a course.
Fig. 4. Notifications
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D. Technical considerations
At the technical level, TICademia is hosted on a Virtual
Server EC2 Amazon Web Services, using container technology
supported by Docker. Fig. 5 presents the architecture diagram.
IV. COMPARISON WITH OTHER ALTERNATIVES
We decided to do a comparison between TICademia and
similar projects. We evaluated some of the features that we
consider are the most important for carrying out effective
programming courses of this type: VLE’s administration
features, aspects related to gamification and general
characteristics of accessibility. Table IV summarizes such a
comparison.
According to the results presented, there are several
advantages of TICademia over other platforms. Maybe the
most important, at least from a teachers’ perspective, is that
TICademia is the only one that supports customized creation of
content: This means that teachers may 'design' their courses in
the way they consider the best, according to their particular
curricular requirements and pedagogical considerations.
Related to the previous, other important feature of TICademia
is the possibility of obtaining statistics on the performance and
progress of students. Since none of the other platforms allow
for the administration of courses, it makes really difficult to
efficiently monitor students.
Fig. 5. Architecture diagram
Related to the access restrictions, most of the platforms are
partially free. This is completely understandable because they
have some maintenance costs that must be assumed. For now,
all courses and features in TICademia are totally free to anyone
interested.
Regarding the feedback received, most platforms consider
correct and incorrect answers. Some of them also consider
some kinds of errors, but only TICademia considers the time
limit exceeded. In our approach, this element is a key for
algorithms since it ensures that solutions are efficient.
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 As for the points, achievements, levels, and ranking,
TICademia is the only one that implements all of them at once,
whereas the others miss at least one. Related to the ability to
connect the platform with social networks and other platforms,
all alternatives except for one have it. TICademia considers for
the time being only Facebook and Google, though it is planned
to integrate more of them.
Finally, related to programming languages, TICademia is
the one that supports the less. However, it is also planned in the
future to add support for more of them. In relation to the
language, all alternatives have support for the English language
while TICademia only has a Spanish version.

TABLE V. COMPARISON BETWEEN PLATFORMS

Feature Codecademy Codeschool Treehouse CodingGame Checkio CodeHunt TICademia

Ability to create NO NO NO NO NO NO YES
courses
Languages HTML, HTML, JS, RUBY, C#, C++, Javascript, JAVA, C# JAVA, C++
supported Javascript, Python, JAVA, C#, JAVA, PYTHON
Python, JAVA Objective-C, PHP, Javascript,
Ruby, PHP, C# PYTHON Python, Perl,
SQL PHP, Ruby
Feedback type Exception, Success / NO Failure / Correct / Match / Accepted/
Correct, Incorrect Success / Incorrect / Mismatch Wrong
Incorrect Compilation Runtime Answer/
error / Error / Time Limit /
Runtime Error Compilati Compilation
on Error Error /
RunTime
Error
Ability to Facebook, Facebook, NO Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, Facebook,
connect with Google GitHub, Google, Google, Google, Google
social networks Google LinkedIn, GitHub Hotmail,
GitHub Yahoo
Create groups / NO NO NO YES NO NO YES
Add friends
Points YES YES NO YES YES YES YES
Achievements YES NO NO YES NO NO YES
Levels NO YES NO NO YES YES YES
Ranking NO NO NO YES YES YES YES
Ability to get NO NO NO NO NO NO YES
stats (as
professor)
Access Free (Paid for Free (Paid for Free (Paid Free Free (Paid Free Free
restrictions more features) more features) for more for more
features) features)
Language English / English English English / English English Spanish
Support Spanish French

V. CONCLUSIONS Another element that we consider as an advantage is that it

When a teacher decides to use a virtual learning
environment for computer programming courses, there are
several alternatives depending on the needs and budget.
TICademia is one of them and, even being a work in progress,
has several features that make it an interesting option to
consider. It is based mainly on two approaches: competitive
programming and gamification. But not only that; it integrates
them deeply, much more that other platforms.
incorporates “time limit” as one of the possible feedbacks for
students’ algorithms. We believe this is essential because
forces students to think in efficient solutions. Another
advantage, which could not be seen like that at first sight, is
that TICademia is in Spanish. This, of course, limits the public
who can access it, but at the same time serves to a population
who possibly does not have enough English skills
As future work, we have in mind several, maybe “crazy”,
ideas. One of them consists of providing TICademia with

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learning analytics capabilities. Making use of data mining
algorithms would allow us to find patterns about -for example-
students’ performance. This could help, for instance, to forecast
dropouts and therefore improve courses’ contents.
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