Code Hunt: Experience with Coding Contests at Scale

Bishop, Judith; Horspool, R. Nigel; Xie, Tao; Tillmann, Nikolai; Halleux, Jonathan de

doi:10.1109/icse.2015.172

Cited by 36 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…To become an expert in a programming language one needs a lot of practice and a great motivation. This idea is supported by Judith Bishop & al [8]who claims that learner's motivation could be fostered trough integration of an entertaining aspect to programming by using audiovisual elements, social networks and mobile learning. They came up with a serious game Code Hunt [8].The player has to write a code in Java or C # to progress through the levels of the game.…”

Section: Using Serious Games To Learn a Programming Languagementioning

confidence: 64%

A Serious Game for Learning C Programming Language Concepts Using Solo Taxonomy

Yassine¹,

Chenouni²,

Berrada³

et al. 2017

Int. J. Emerg. Technol. Learn.

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Abstract-this paper conducts a study to identify pedagogical approaches and gameplay techniques involved in the development of serious games for teaching scientific courses in general especially programming languages. The concept of serious games is increasingly popular and is considered as an innovative teaching practice since it is based on information and communication technology and gamification to foster learning. To this end, a serious game "Perobo" will be introduced and discussed. It is based on a set of gameplay techniques and pedagogical approaches used for teaching pointers, considered as a difficult concept in C programming language. The game is also based on a taxonomy design to define the learning levels.

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Section: Using Serious Games To Learn a Programming Languagementioning

confidence: 64%

A Serious Game for Learning C Programming Language Concepts Using Solo Taxonomy

Yassine¹,

Chenouni²,

Berrada³

et al. 2017

Int. J. Emerg. Technol. Learn.

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“…In previous work [1], we discussed our experience with contests and many of the results we have obtained. This short experience paper is intended to provide advice on how to choose and fine-tune the puzzles when a new contest is being created.…”

Section: Figure 1 After Solving a Puzzle The Player Gets A Scorementioning

confidence: 70%

Experience with constructing code hunt contests

Horspool

Bishop

Halleux

et al. 2015

Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Code Hunt Workshop on Educational Software Engineering

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Puzzles are the basic building block of Code Hunt contests. Creating puzzles and choosing suitable puzzles from the puzzle bank turns out to be a complex operation requiring skill and experience. Constructing a varied and interesting mix of puzzles is based on several factors. The major factor is the difficulty of the puzzle, so that the contest can build up from easier puzzles to more difficult ones. For a successful and fun contest aimed at the expected abilities of the contestants, other factors include the language features needed to solve the puzzle, clues to provide when the puzzle is presented to the player, and test cases to seed into the Code Hunt engine. We describe our experience with contest construction over a period of year and provide guidelines for choosing and making adjustments to the puzzles so that a Code Hunt contest will provide a satisfying trouble-free experience for the contestants.

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“…There are several successful examples of gamification for software engineering, where the methodology has been applied mostly to increase the motivation and performance of people participating in software engineering activities [18]. For instance, the popular FindBugs tool (http://findbugs.sourceforge.net/) was gamified in order to motivate developers to remove warnings from their codebase [19] the formal verification of programs was gamified in such a way that verifying programs does not require highly trained professionals and becomes a more cost-effective activity [20] and finally, the web-based game CodeHunt was developed to teach coding at different skill levels [21]. In this paper we argue that mutation testing is also amenable to gamification, and could potentially be an effective way of bridging the gap between mutation testing research and software engineering practice [4], [22].…”

Section: B Gamificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Code Defenders: A Mutation Testing Game

Rojas

2016

2016 IEEE Ninth International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation Workshops (ICSTW)

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Abstract-Mutation testing is endorsed by software testing researchers for its unique capability of providing pragmatic estimates of a test suite's fault detection capability, and for guiding testers in improving their test suites. In practice, however, widespread adoption of mutation testing is hampered because any non-trivial program results in huge numbers of mutants, many of which are either trivial or equivalent, and thus useless. Trivial mutants reduce the motivation of developers in trusting and using the technique, while equivalent mutants are frustratingly difficult to handle. These problems are exacerbated by insufficient education on testing, which often means that mutation testing is not well understood in practice. These are examples of the types of problems that gamification aims to overcome by making such tedious activities competitive and entertaining. In this paper, we introduce the first steps towards building CODE DEFENDERS, a mutation testing game where players take the role of an attacker, who aims to create the most subtle non-equivalent mutants, or a defender, who aims to create strong tests to kill these mutants. The benefits of such an approach are manifold: The game can serve an educational role by engaging learners in mutation testing activities in a fun way. Experienced players will produce strong test suites, capable of detecting even the most subtle bugs that other players can conceive. Equivalent mutants are handled by making them a special part of the gameplay, where points are at stake in duels between attackers and defenders.

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Code Hunt: Experience with Coding Contests at Scale

Cited by 36 publications

References 10 publications

A Serious Game for Learning C Programming Language Concepts Using Solo Taxonomy

A Serious Game for Learning C Programming Language Concepts Using Solo Taxonomy

Experience with constructing code hunt contests

Code Defenders: A Mutation Testing Game

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