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We present preliminaries ideas and a prototype implementation of a collaborative environment based on gamification aimed at teaching coding and software life cycle principles such as design, development, and testing to beginners. As a guide example, we consider a two player game in which each player can dynamically modify its strategy via a simple rule-based language. In this setting the player console plays the role of usual coding tools. However, the sprite controlled by each player can be viewed as a sort of reactive module that interacts with the other players within the chosen game. The game starts with a default strategy. During a game play, players can then adapt their strategy by updating the rules that govern the behaviour of their sprites. The prototype is designed on top of the Python arcade library extended with a communication middleware built on top of asyncio and zeromq to run the environment on a set of remote machines.

In this paper, we present our experience of using the Team Based Learning (TBL) methodology and the Sonic Pi language in an introductory programming course. Sonic Pi is a code-based musical creation and performance tool, also widely used for computer science (CS) educational purposes, since every musical concept corresponds to a notion of computer programming. This aspect makes it extremely effective in adapting to different learning objectives and environments, and in tuning the topics with learners interests and attitudes. Specifically, we designed two TBL activities aimed at first-year undergraduate students in CS, the first focusing on anticipating a new advanced CS topic and the second on a learning objective of the Introduction to Programming Course.