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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.