Abstract
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.

Abstract
We present FGPE AuthorKit, a tool to author programming exercises featuring gamification elements that provide additional motivation for the students to intensify their learning effort. The tool allows the (1) creation of exercises and their associated metadata, (2) selection and parameterization of adequate gamification techniques for a specific exercise or their collection, (3) design of the content structure and sequencing rules, and (4) importing and exporting the content in the formats of choice. © 2020 ACM.

Abstract
The paper introduces Gamified Education Interoperability Language (GEdIL), designed as a means to represent the set of gamification concepts and rules applied to courses and exercises separately from their actual educational content. This way, GEdIL allows not only for an easy yet effective specification of gamification schemes for educational purposes, but also sharing them among instructors and reusing in various courses. GEdIL is published as an open format, independent from any commercial vendor, and supported with dedicated open-source software.

Abstract
The practice is the crux of learning to program. Automated assessment plays a key role in enabling timely feedback without access to teachers but alone is insufficient to engage students and maximize the outcome of their practice. Graphical feedback and game-thinking promote positive effects on students' motivation as shown by some serious programming games, but those games are complex to create and adapt. This paper presents Asura, an environment for assessment of game-based coding challenges, built on a specialized framework, in which students are invited to develop a software agent (SA) to play it. During the coding phase, students can take advantage of the graphical feedback to complete the proposed task. Some challenges also encourage students to think of a SA that plays in a setting with interaction among SAs. In such a case, the environment supports the creation and visualization of tournaments among submitted agents. Furthermore, the validation of this environment from the learners' perspective is also described. 2012 ACM Subject Classification Applied computing ! Interactive learning environments; Applied computing ! E-learning.

Abstract
There are countless reasons cited in scientific studies to explain the difficulties in programming learning. The reasons range from the subject's complexity, the ineffective teaching and study methods, to psychological aspects such as demotivation. Still, learning programming often boils down to practice on exercise solving. Hence, it is essential to understand that the nature of a programming exercise is an important factor for the success and consistent learning. This paper explores different approaches on the creation of a programming exercise, starting with realizing how it is currently formalized, presented and evaluated. From there, authors suggest variations that seek to broaden the way an exercise is solved and, with this diversity, increase student engagement and learning outcome. The several types of exercises presented can use gamification techniques fostering student motivation. To contextualize the student with his peers, we finish presenting metrics that can be obtained by existing automatic assessment tools. 2012 ACM Subject Classification Applied computing ! Education.

Abstract
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. 2012 ACM Subject Classification Social and professional topics ! Computer science education.