A Roadmap to Gamify Programming Education

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

GrassPlot - a database of multi-scale plant diversity in Palaearctic grasslands

GrassPlot is a collaborative vegetation-plot database organised by the Eurasian Dry Grassland Group (EDGG) and listed in the Global Index of Vegetation-Plot Databases (GIVD ID EU-00-003). GrassPlot collects plot records (releves) from grasslands and other open habitats of the Palaearctic biogeographic realm. It focuses on precisely delimited plots of eight standard grain sizes (0.0001; 0.001;... 1,000 m(2)) and on nested-plot series with at least four different grain sizes. The usage of GrassPlot is regulated through Bylaws that intend to balance the interests of data contributors and data users. The current version (v. 1.00) contains data for approximately 170,000 plots of different sizes and 2,800 nested-plot series. The key components are richness data and metadata. However, most included datasets also encompass compositional data. About 14,000 plots have near-complete records of terricolous bryophytes and lichens in addition to vascular plants. At present, GrassPlot contains data from 36 countries throughout the Palaearctic, spread across elevational gradients and major grassland types. GrassPlot with its multi-scale and multi-taxon focus complements the larger international vegetationplot databases, such as the European Vegetation Archive (EVA) and the global database " sPlot". Its main aim is to facilitate studies on the scale-and taxon-dependency of biodiversity patterns and drivers along macroecological gradients. GrassPlot is a dynamic database and will expand through new data collection coordinated by the elected Governing Board. We invite researchers with suitable data to join GrassPlot. Researchers with project ideas addressable with GrassPlot data are welcome to submit proposals to the Governing Board

European Vegetation Archive (EVA): An integrated database of European vegetation plots

© 2016 International Association for Vegetation Science. The European Vegetation Archive (EVA) is a centralized database of European vegetation plots developed by the IAVS Working Group European Vegetation Survey. It has been in development since 2012 and first made available for use in research projects in 2014. It stores copies of national and regional vegetation- plot databases on a single software platform. Data storage in EVA does not affect on-going independent development of the contributing databases, which remain the property of the data contributors. EVA uses a prototype of the database management software TURBOVEG 3 developed for joint management of multiple databases that use different species lists. This is facilitated by the SynBioSys Taxon Database, a system of taxon names and concepts used in the individual European databases and their corresponding names on a unified list of European flora. TURBOVEG 3 also includes procedures for handling data requests, selections and provisions according to the approved EVA Data Property and Governance Rules. By 30 June 2015, 61 databases from all European regions have joined EVA, contributing in total 1 027 376 vegetation plots, 82% of them with geographic coordinates, from 57 countries. EVA provides a unique data source for large-scale analyses of European vegetation diversity both for fundamental research and nature conservation applications. Updated information on EVA is available online at http://euroveg.org/eva-database

Gamifikacja w zarządzaniu wiedzą : motywowanie do dzielenia się wiedzą

Effective knowledge management relies on successful knowledge sharing. One of the main barriers for knowledge sharing is the lack of employees’ motivation, whereas gamification is a proven means to induce intrinsic motivation. We consider these two observations as reasons to consider applying gamification in the area of knowledge management with the aim of inducing motivation for knowledge sharing. The paper discusses both the issues of knowledge sharing and the components of gamification, and then describes an implementable solution in a form of a system of gamification rules aimed at motivating employees for various activities related to knowledge sharing.Efektywne zarządzanie wiedzą opiera się na pomyślnym dzieleniu się wiedzą. Jedną z głównych barier dzielenia się wiedzą jest brak motywacji pracowników, natomiast gamifikacja jest sprawdzonym środkiem do wywołania wewnętrznej motywacji. Uznajemy te dwie obserwacje jako powody do rozważenia stosowania gamifikacji w obszarze zarządzania wiedzą w celu indukowania motywacji do dzielenia się wiedzą. W pracy omówiono zarówno zagadnienia związane z dzieleniem się wiedzą, jak i elementy gamifikacji, a następnie opisano możliwe do wdrożenia rozwiązanie, w postaci systemu zasad gamifikacji mających na celu motywowanie pracowników do różnych działań związanych z dzieleniem się wiedzą

Implementing an interactive programming course using web technology

W artykule podjęto problem implementacji interaktywnego kursu programowania w technologii webowej. Opisano przykład udanej implementacji takiego kursu opartej na wykorzystaniu standardowych technologii webowych i zestawu gotowych komponentów, uwzględniając m.in.: wymagania stawiane interaktywnemu kursowi programowania, architekturę i technologię rozwiązania, niezbędne składniki i format zapisu treści kursu, komponenty i układ interfejsu użytkownika, sposób edycji i wykonywania kodu rozwiązania oraz zasady weryfikacji poprawności rozwiązań i generowania podpowiedzi dla uczestników kursu.The paper discusses the problem of implementing an interactive programming course using web technology. An example of a successful implementation of such a course using standard web technology and ready-made components has been described, including such aspects as: the requirements for an interactive programming course, the architecture and technology of the solution, the necessary components and the format of the course content, the components and layout of the user interface, the solutions chosen for code editing and execution, and the rules for verifying the correctness of exercise solutions and generating hints for course participants

The functional structure of a gamified learning management system

Gamifikacja jako forma wzbudzania motywacji wewnętrznej poprzez wykorzystanie elementów zaczerpniętych z gier cieszy się coraz większym zainteresowaniem instytucji edukacyjnych i nauczycieli. Jednak pomimo iż wzrasta liczba dostępnych podręczników gamifikacji, to jej praktyczna implementacja nadal wymaga znaczących nakładów sił i środków. Choć popularne systemy zarządzania nauczaniem udostępniają już moduły pozwalające na wprowadzanie do kursów elementów gamifikacji, ich wykorzystanie jest pracochłonne, a możliwości nader ograniczone. Rozwiązaniem jest wykorzystanie systemu zarządzania nauczaniem, w którym gamifikację uwzględniono już na etapie projektowania, co pozwoli na jej łatwe wykorzystanie przez projektujących i prowadzących kursy. W niniejszym opracowaniu zaproponowano i skonkretyzowano wizję struktury funkcjonalnej takiego systemu.Gamification, as a form of inducing intrinsic motivation by using elements characteristic for games, is gaining more and more interest in educational institutions and among teachers. Notwithstanding the increasing number of available gamification textbooks, its practical implementation still requires substantial effort on instructor’s behalf. Although the popular Learning Management Systems already provide modules allowing to include gamification elements within the courses, making use of them is labor-intensive, and the range of provided features is very limited. The solution is to use a Learning Management System not only having a wide range of gamification features embedded already at its design stage, but also suitable for easy use by course designers and teachers. This paper proposes a detailed vision of the functional structure of such a system

Enhancing the tourist attraction visiting process with gamification: key concepts

The main purpose of this paper is to describe key gamification techniques that can be applied to enhance the tourist attraction visiting process. The paper is based on the methodology of design patterns; particularly it adopts the definition and classification schemes originally proposed and developed in the context of gamification of work to specify gamification techniques related to various aspects of the tourist attraction visiting process. The main result is the selection of twelve gamification techniques for enhancing the tourist attraction visiting process, four for each of the three phases of the visiting process (before, during and after the visit). The paper shows that gamification techniques can be applied to enhance the tourist attraction visiting process. Implementation of the proposed gamification techniques is supposed to both improve visitor experience and give the tourist attraction managers a tool for boosting interest in less popular exhibitions and events

Formalized hierarchically nested expert system for classification of mesic and wet grasslands in Poland

The goal of this study was to propose a hierarchically nested classification system comprising four principal levels of the Braun-Blanquet system for Polish grasslands of the class Molinio-Arrhenatheretea. Using the Cocktail method, we defined consistent criteria for delimitation of the class, three orders, nine alliances, and 45 associations. Formal definitions were prepared using the summed cover and presence/absence information of species groups and individual dominant species. We created an expert system with a set of assignment rules that unambiguously classify relevés to a single unit at the given abstraction level of the Braun-Blanquet system in such a way that a relevé matched by the definition of a focal vegetation unit must be matched by definitions of all superior units. Of 11,535 relevés classified to Molinio-Arrhenatheretea, 36% were recognized at the association level, and 57% and 85% at the alliance and order level, respectively. All relevés were assigned unambiguously, meaning that a single relevé could not be assigned to more than one unit within the same hierarchical level (no overlap between vegetation units). This study is the first proposal of a hierarchically nested classification system that classifies grassland vegetation at different syntaxonomical levels unequivocally. It is important to create definitions for different syntaxonomical levels because the majority of vegetation patches do not fit to the associations, but can only be assigned to high-rank units such as alliance, order, or class

GEdIL-gamified education interoperability language

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