Search

Information technology and digital solutions as enablers in the tourism sector require continuous development of skills, as digital transformation is characterized by fast change, complexity and uncertainty. This research investigates how a cMOOC concept could support the tourism industry. A consortium of three universities, a tourism association, and a tourist attraction investigates online learning needs and habits of tourism industry stakeholders in the field of digitalization in a cross-border study in the Baltic Sea region. The multi-national survey (n = 244) reveals a high interest in participating in an online learning community, with two-thirds of respondents seeing opportunities to contributing to such community apart from consuming knowledge. The paper demonstrates preferred ways of learning, motivational and hampering aspects as well as types of possible contributions.

Keeping students engaged while learning programming is becoming more and more imperative. Of the several proposed techniques, gamification is presumably the most widely studied and has already proven as an effective means to engage students. However, there is a complete lack of public and customizable solutions to gamified programming education that can be reused with personalized rules and learning material. FGPE Gamification Service (FGPE GS) is an open-source GraphQL service that transforms a package containing the gamification layer – adhering to a dedicated open-source language, GEdIL – into a game. The game provides students with a gamified experience leveraging on the automatically-assessable activities referenced by the challenges. This paper presents FGPE GS, its architecture, data model, and validation.

The importance of e-learning tools facilitating the process of learning to program is growing, especially as the pandemic-caused lockdown enforced distance learning in many countries. The key success factor in this process is the provision of an instant and relevant feedback to students. In this paper, we describe a novel open-source programming learning environment featuring automatic assessment of students' solutions and customized gamification. This environment has been developed as a part of the FGPE framework., OASIcs, Vol. 91, Second International Computer Programming Education Conference (ICPEC 2021), pages 5:1-5:8

Learning programming relies on practicing it which is often hampered by the barrier of difficulty. The combined use of automated assessment, which provides fast feedback to the students experimenting with their code, and gamification, which provides additional motivation for the students to intensify their learning effort, can help pass the barrier of difficulty in learning programming. In such environment, students keep receiving the relevant feedback no matter how many times they try (thanks to automated assessment), and their engagement is retained (thanks to gamification). While there is a number of open software and programming exercise collections supporting automated assessment, up to this date, there are no available open collections of gamified programming exercises, no open interactive programming learning environment that would support such exercises, and even no open standard for the representation of such exercises so that they could be developed in different educational institutions and shared among them. This gap is addressed by Framework for Gamified Programming Education (FGPE), an international project whose primary objective is to provide necessary prerequisites for the application of gamification to programming education, including a dedicated gamification scheme, a gamified exercise format and exercises conforming to it, software for editing the exercises and an interactive learning environment capable of presenting them to students. This paper presents the FGPE project, its architecture and main components, as well as the results achieved so far., OASIcs, Vol. 81, First International Computer Programming Education Conference (ICPEC 2020), pages 26:1-26:7

Using a programming language based on English can pose an obstacle for learning programming, especially at its early stage, for students who do not understand English. In this paper, however, we report on an experiment in which higher-education students who have some knowledge of both Python and English were asked to solve programming exercises in a Polish-language-based version of Python. The results of the survey performed after the experiment indicate that even among the students who both know English and learned the original Python language, there is a group of students who appreciate the advantages of the translated version., OASIcs, Vol. 81, First International Computer Programming Education Conference (ICPEC 2020), pages 25:1-25:6

This paper introduces Yet Another Programming Exercises Interoperability Language (YAPExIL), a JSON format that aims to: (1) support several kinds of programming exercises behind traditional blank sheet activities; (2) capitalize on expressiveness and interoperability to constitute a strong candidate to standard open programming exercises format. To this end, it builds upon an existing open format named PExIL, by mitigating its weaknesses and extending its support for a handful of exercise types. YAPExIL is published as an open format, independent from any commercial vendor, and supported with dedicated open-source software.

Automatic checking of the correctness of students' solutions of programming exercises for generating appropriate feedback is a necessary component of interactive programming learning environments. Although there are multiple ways of specifying such a check, ranging from mere string patterns to code written in general-purpose programming language, they all have their deficiencies, with the check specification being too verbose, too complicated, difficult to reuse, or very limited in its expressive capabilities. In this paper, a new language designed especially for this purpose is described. It provides both extension and replacement for RegEx-based pattern specification so that checks typical for programming exercise verification can be expressed in a concise and highly-readable manner.