TY - GEN
T1 - Applying gamification to motivate students to write high-quality code in programming assignments
AU - Kasahara, Remin
AU - Sakamoto, Kazunori
AU - Washizaki, Hironori
AU - Fukazawa, Yoshiaki
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was partially supported by JST Presto Grant Number JPMJPR14D4. I am deeply grateful to Prof. Kana Shimizu of Waseda University for the opportunity to conduct this experiment. Students? participation was also invaluable. Advice given by Prof. Ryo Okada of Kagawa University was of great help in the evaluation process.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
PY - 2019/7/2
Y1 - 2019/7/2
N2 - Background: Traditional programming education focuses on training students’ ability to write correct code that meets the specifications in programming assignments. In addition to correctness, software engineering studies argue that code quality is important. Problem: Nurturing students’ ability to write high-quality code in programming assignments is difficult due to two main reasons. (1) Considering code quality while grading is undesirable because there are no objective and fair measurement metrics. (2) Grading assignments from multiple viewpoints (correctness and quality) is difficult and time-consuming. Approach: We propose applying gamification with code metrics to measure code quality in programming assignments. Our approach can motivate students to write code with good metric scores independent of grading. We implemented our approach and conducted a control experiment in a programming course at a university. Result: Our approach did not interfere with students’ submissions but improved metric scores significantly. Hence, our approach can engage students to write high-quality code.
AB - Background: Traditional programming education focuses on training students’ ability to write correct code that meets the specifications in programming assignments. In addition to correctness, software engineering studies argue that code quality is important. Problem: Nurturing students’ ability to write high-quality code in programming assignments is difficult due to two main reasons. (1) Considering code quality while grading is undesirable because there are no objective and fair measurement metrics. (2) Grading assignments from multiple viewpoints (correctness and quality) is difficult and time-consuming. Approach: We propose applying gamification with code metrics to measure code quality in programming assignments. Our approach can motivate students to write code with good metric scores independent of grading. We implemented our approach and conducted a control experiment in a programming course at a university. Result: Our approach did not interfere with students’ submissions but improved metric scores significantly. Hence, our approach can engage students to write high-quality code.
KW - Code metrics
KW - Code quality
KW - Gamification
KW - Leaderboard
KW - Online judge
KW - Programming education
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85070881038&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85070881038&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3304221.3319792
DO - 10.1145/3304221.3319792
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85070881038
T3 - Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, ITiCSE
SP - 92
EP - 98
BT - ITiCSE 2019 - Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
T2 - 2019 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, ITiCSE 2019
Y2 - 15 July 2019 through 17 July 2019
ER -