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Malicious actors can cause severe damage by exploiting software vulnerabilities. In industrial settings, where critical infrastructures rely on software, handling these vulnerabilities with utmost care is crucial to prevent catastrophic consequences. For this purpose, a cybersecurity awareness platform called Sifu was created. This platform automatically assesses challenges to verify its compliance to secure coding guidelines. Using an artificial intelligence method, an interactive component provides players with solution-guiding hints. This paper presents an improved version of the Sifu platform, which evolves the tool in the following aspects: architecture, data model and user interface. The new platform separates the server and client-side using a REST API architecture. It also accommodates an intrinsic and richer layer of gamification, which explores the concept of game rooms at an organizational and gamification level. Finally, it offers an improved interactive training experience for individuals and organizations through a responsive and intuitive single-page web application.

Escape rooms offer an immersive and engaging learning experience that encourages critical thinking, problem solving and teamwork. Although they have shown promising results in promoting student engagement in the teaching-learning process, they continue to operate as independent systems that are not fully integrated into educational environments. This work aims to detail the integration of educational escape rooms, based on international standards, with the typical central component of an educational setting - the learning management system (LMS). In order to proof this concept, we present the integration of a math escape room with the Moodle LMS using the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) specification. Currently, this specification comprises a set of Web services that enable seamless integration between learning platforms and external tools and is not limited to any specific LMS which fosters learning interoperability. With this implementation, a single sign-on ecosystem is created, where teachers and students can interact in a simple and immersive way. The major contribution of this work is to serve as an integration guide for other applications and in different domains.

Web programming education is an important component of modern computer science curricula. Assessing students’ web programming skills can be time-consuming and challenging for educators. This paper introduces Webpal, an automated assessment tool for web programming exercises in entry-level courses. Webpal evaluates web applications coded in HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and provides feedback to students. This tool integrates with Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) through an API, allowing the creation, storage, and access to exercises while assessing student attempts based on the created exercises. The evaluation process comprises various subcomponents: static assessment, interface matching, functional testing, and feedback management. This approach aims to provide feedback that helps students overcome their challenges in web programming assignments. This paper also presents a demo showcasing the tool’s features and functionality in a simulated VLE environment.

This paper presents a study on the use of gamified educational escape rooms to foster the teaching-learning process of computer programming, based on an user type taxonomy. The ultimate goal of this work is to identify and validate the most suitable gamification elements and mechanics for each user profile, providing case studies that illustrate their implementation. The main contribution of this work is to guide the design process of educational escape rooms in any domain, by considering the needs, preferences, and motivations of different user types.

OASIcs, Volume 112, ICPEC 2023, Complete Volume

The paper discusses an ongoing project that aims to enhance the UX of teachers while using e-learning systems. Specifically, the project focuses on developing the teacher’s user interface (UI) for Agni, a web-based code playground for learning JavaScript. The goal is to design an intuitive UI with valuable features that will encourage more teachers to use the system. To achieve this goal, the paper explores the use of a headless Content Management System (CMS) called Strapi. The primary research question the paper seeks to answer is whether a headless CMS, specifically Strapi, can provide a good UX to teachers. A usability evaluation of the built-in Strapi UI for content creation and management reveals it to be generally consistent and user-friendly but challenging and unintuitive to create courses with programming exercises. As a result, the decision was made to develop a new teacher’s UI based on the existing Agni UI for students in an editable version. Once the development is complete, a new usability evaluation of the fully developed teacher’s UI will be conducted with the Strapi UI evaluation as a baseline for comparison.

Front Matter, Table of Contents, Preface, Conference Organization

This paper describes ongoing research to develop a system to automatically generate exercises on document type validation. It aims to support multiple text-based document formalisms, currently including JSON and XML. Validation of JSON documents uses JSON Schema and validation of XML uses both XML Schema and DTD. The exercise generator receives as input a document type and produces two sets of documents: valid and invalid instances. Document types written by students must validate the former and invalidate the latter. Exercises produced by this generator can be automatically accessed in a state-of-the-art assessment system. This paper details the proposed approach and describes the design of the system currently being implemented.

Learning programming boils down to the practice of solving exercises. However, although there are good and diversified exercises, these are held in proprietary systems hindering their interoperability. This article presents a simple scraping tool, called ScraPE, which through a navigation, interaction and data extraction script, materialized in a domain-specific language, allows extracting the data necessary from Web pages - typically online judges - to compose programming exercises in a standard language. The tool is validated by extracting exercises from a specific online judge. This tool is part of a larger project where the main objective is to provide programming exercises through a simple GraphQL API.

One of the most important phases in the Web development cycle is testing. There are several types of tests, different approaches to their use and a wide range of tools. However, most of them are not open source, require coding and do not have a pedagogical nature. This article introduces WebPuppet as an automated Web UI testing tool. The tool is distributed as a small Node package and can be easily integrated into any learning environment in the web development domain. In addition, it does not require coding in any language, just use a very simple domain-specific language that will generate a test script to run in client applications. In order to exemplify its use, a simple test scenario based on a login page is presented.

This paper proposes a roadmap to integrate existing educational web applications into the ecosystem based on a learning management system. To achieve this integration, applications must support the Learning Tools Interoperability specification in the role of tool provider. The paper starts with an overview of the evolution of this specification, emphasizing the main features of the current stable version. Then, it proposes a set of design goals and milestones to guide the adaptation process. The proposed roadmap was validated with existing applications. This paper reports on the challenges faced to apply it in these concrete cases.

Computer science is a skill that will continue to be in high demand in the foreseeable future. Despite this trend, automated assessment in computer science is often hampered by the lack of systems supporting a wide range of topics. While there is a number of open software systems and programming exercise collections supporting automated assessment, up to this date, there are few systems that offer a diversity of exercises ranging from computer programming exercises to markup and databases languages. At the same time, most of the best-of-breed solutions force teachers and students to alternate between the Learning Management System - a pivotal piece of the e-learning ecosystem - and the tool providing the exercises. This issue is addressed by JuezLTI, an international project whose goal is to create an innovative tool to allow the automatic assessment of exercises in a wide range of computer science topics. These topics include different languages used in computer science for programming, markup, and database management. JuezLTI borrows part of its name from the IMS Learning Tools Interoperability (IMS LTI) standard. With this standard, the tool will interoperate with reference systems such as Moodle, Sakai, Canvas, or Blackboard, among many others. Another contribution of JuezLTI will be a pool of exercises. Interoperability and content are expected to foster the adoption of JuezLTI by many institutions. This paper presents the JuezLTI project, its architecture, and its main components.

Practice is pivotal in learning programming. As many other automated assessment tools for programming assignments, Mooshak has been adopted by numerous educational practitioners to support them in delivering timely and accurate feedback to students during exercise solving. These tools specialize in the delivery and assessment of blank-sheet coding questions. However, the different phases of a student’s learning path may demand distinct types of exercises (e.g., bug fix and block sorting) to foster new competencies such as debugging programs and understanding unknown source code or, otherwise, to break the routine and keep engagement. Recently, a format for describing programming exercises - YAPExIL -, supporting different types of activities, has been introduced. Unfortunately, no automated assessment tool yet supports this novel format. This paper describes a JavaScript library to transform YAPExIL packages into Mooshak problem packages (i.e., MEF format), keeping support for all exercise types. Moreover, its integration in an exercise authoring tool is described.

Front Matter, Table of Contents, Preface, Conference Organization

This article documents some experiments on teaching a class on a Master Degree Program using a different perspective on gamification. Instead of winning badges or getting achievements, students earn classification points. This allows them to work as hard as they are willing, having in mind their current classification and how far they can reach. In the specific experiment being reported, students can earn final grade points with pull requests to a shared class project. The article describes the details of the experiment, extrapolates on different ideas for implementing this in other classes, and concludes with the pros and cons of such approach for student evaluation.

Problem-solving is considered one of the most important skills to retain in the coming decades for building a modern and proactive society. In this realm, computer programming learning is vital to enrich those skills. Practicing in this area boils down to solve programming exercises. In order to foster this practice, it is necessary to provide students with the best of the breed automated tools and a good set of exercises in a fair quantity covering the curricula of a typical programming course. Despite the increasing appearance of automated tools such as program evaluators, gamification engines and sophisticated web environments, access to exercises remains problematic. In fact, although the existence of several code repositories (most for feed computer programming contests), the majority of them store the exercises in proprietary formats and without any access facilities hindering their use. This leaves no other option to teachers but to manually create programming exercises which is time-consuming and error prone, or simply, reuse the same exercises, from previous years, which is considered as a detrimental and limiting approach to enhance multi-faceted and creative programmers. The article surveys the current interoperability efforts on programming exercises, more precisely, in terms of serialization formats and communication protocols. This study will sustain the selection of an API to feed a code playground called LearnJS with random programming exercises.

OASIcs, Volume 91, ICPEC 2021, Complete Volume

Learning computer programming is a complex activity and requires a lot of practice. The viral pandemic that we are facing has intensified these difficulties. In this context, programming learning platforms play a crucial role. Most of them are characterized by providing a wide range of exercises with progressive complexity, multi-language support, sophisticated interfaces and automatic evaluation and gamification services. Nevertheless, despite the various features provided, others features, which influence user experience, are not emphasized, such as performance and usability. This article presents an user experience evaluation of the LearnJS playground, a JavaScript learning platform which aims to foster the practice of coding. The evaluation highlights two facets of the code playground: performance and a usability. In the former, lab and field data were collected based on Google Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights reports. In the later, an inquiry was distributed among students from a Web Technologies course with a set of questions based on flexibility, usability and consistency heuristics. Both evaluation studies have a twofold goal: to improve the learning environment in order to be officially used in the next school year and to foster the awareness of user experience in all phases of the software development life-cycle as a key facet in Web applications engagement and loyalty.

OASIcs, Volume 94, SLATE 2021, Complete Volume

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.

Front Matter, Table of Contents, Preface, Conference Organization

The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a World Wide Web Consortium standard, based on the Resource Description Format standard. It is used to define ontologies. While large ontologies are useful for different applications, some tools require partial ontologies, based mostly on a hierarchical relationship of classes. In this article we present bOWL, a basic OWL browser, with the main goal of being pluggable into others, more significant, web applications. The tool was tested through its integration on LeXmart, a dictionary editing tool.

Front Matter, Table of Contents, Preface, Conference Organization

OASIcs, Volume 83, SLATE 2020, Complete Volume

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.

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.

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, Volume 81, ICPEC 2020, Complete Volume

Computer programming plays a relevant role in the digital age as a key competency for project leverage and a driver of innovation for today’s modern societies. Despite its importance, this domain is also well known for their higher learning failure rates. In this context, the study of how computer programming is taught is fundamental to clarify the teaching-learning process and to ensure the sharing of the best practices. This paper presents a survey on computer programming teaching in the first-year courses of Portuguese Universities, more precisely, what is taught and how it is taught. The study focuses essentially on the following facets: the class characterization, the methodologies used and the languages/technologies taught. Based on these criteria, a survey was done which gathers information of 59 courses included in a wide range of Universities spread across Portugal. The results were collected and analyzed. Based on this analysis a set of conclusions were taken revealing some interesting results on the teaching methods and languages used which can be useful to support a discussion on this subject and, consequently, to find new paths to shape the future of programming teaching.

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.

Front Matter, Table of Contents, Preface, Conference Organization

The architectural pattern of micro-services is being increasingly adopted by developers, facilitating the maintenance and scalability of the systems' code. The adoption and consumption of these micro-services are often seen on the front-end code of the Web applications. Nevertheless, this adoption obliges web designers/developers to know where to look for those web services, to read their documentation and to write the request/response code as well to control the corresponding UI rendering. This whole process is time-consuming and error-prone. This article introduces SeCoGen as an interactive code generator for Web service parsing and consumption. The generator benefits from an HTTP request template, a query normalizer and dynamic UI templates. In order, to validate the generator feasibility and usefulness, a REST API to search for countries is used.