Gamifying the Teaching and Learning Process in an Advanced Computer Programming Course

These days, the conventional ways of teaching programming are not attractive to students. For instance, classical lecture and tutorial classes are not sufficient and provides only one-way learning environment. Most of the students nowadays prefer to have more engaging, fun, competitive, collaborative, and instant feedback learning environment. These elements can be achieved using gamification to increase students' interest in computer programming courses. More specifically, we used three gamification techniques in one advanced programming course: pair-programming teaching technique to maintain collaboration between students, Kahoot! system to provide an interactive quizzes system and instance feedback, and finally we used Robocode platform to teach Object-Oriented programming concepts in a fun and competitive fashion. We believe that gamifying teaching and learning process has great potential to assist teachers and engage students in a new and challenging way. This paper presents an empirical study that was carried out in one advanced computer-programming course were the mentioned gamification techniques were applied. A subjective system evaluation revealed that the students appreciated the used techniques. The results also revealed that the students' interest in computer programming were enhanced as well.