=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2046/kiraly-et-al
|storemode=property
|title=Code School: Learn to code by practicing
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2046/kiraly-et-al.pdf
|volume=Vol-2046
|authors=Sándor Király,Tamás Balla,Gábor Kusper
}}
==Code School: Learn to code by practicing==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2046/kiraly-et-al.pdf
Code School: Learn to code by practicing
Sándor Király, Tamás Balla, Gábor Kusper
kiraly.sandor@uni-eszterhazy.hu, balla.tamas@uni-eszterhazy.hu,
gkusper@aries.ektf.hu
Institute of Mathematics and Computer Sciences
Eszterházy Károly University
Eger, Hungary
Abstract
Today the IT industry provides an attractive career choice to novice
software developers, but even then, majority of the students pursuing
higher education in computer programming field are not finishing with
enough competencies and capabilities to meet the industry expecta-
tions. It has been observed that such students are not sufficiently fo-
cused on computer programming during their school studies. The main
reason for unconcern in computer programming is identified as the lack
of motivation and engagement of students in learning the program-
ming concepts. kodolosuli.hu is a learning portal that offers interactive
programming courses in three different programming languages: C++,
C# and Java. It has been developed for students who are interested
in computer programming but do not know how to start. Students,
who are not offered programming lessons at school and teacher help
are welcome. The framework of this site has an extensive grader tool
that helps students test their codes without intervention from a teacher,
thus providing a flexible learning experience. The gamification in this
portal is expected to increase students’ engagement and motivation in
learning. The developed LMS (Learning Management System) offers
the authors the ability to improve the courses according to the solved
problems and the comments of the forums. Tasks are stored in an ex-
ercise repository to make creating tests and exams easier. The course
is available in Hungarian.
Keywords: gamification, Learning Management System, computer
programming, game-based learning
1 Introduction
Today in Hungary, there are about 20,000 unfilled IT jobs and most of them are software development positions.
The lack of properly trained staff is a problem for hundreds of companies although thousands of software engineers
and software developers get a degree in every year.
The IT sector could even be a key sector in Hungary since its value-added ratio is 90% and it produces 12% of
Copyright c by the paper’s authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes.
In: E. Vatai (ed.): Proceedings of the 11th Joint Conference on Mathematics and Computer Science, Eger, Hungary, 20th – 22nd of
May, 2016, published at http://ceur-ws.org
136
the Hungarian GDP (Gross Domestic Product). That is why it would be particulary important that high school
students choose this profession in larger numbers and, moreover, the demand for high-skill software developers
is now growing faster than the supply.
To achieve this, IT must be made more attractive for students, and it is particularly important that the high
school students who are interested in this area learn to program. In our experience, students who have already
learnt computer programming can work in the IT sector in their first academic years even as software developers,
gain work experience and acquire this professional status faster than those students who only start to learn
programming in the first academic years.
The main problem is that during learning programming both algorithms and coding are needed to be learned
at the same time. Being familiar with the syntax of a computer language and writing programs in it one are
challenges for youngsters. To understand algoritms is also a big challenge. It is no accident that coding and
making algoritms are different subjects in higher education. Most Hungarian secondary schools prepare students
for only the mid-level exam of informatics that does not include knowledge of programming. The reduced 1 lesson
per week is not enough to teach students both the usage of office programs and programming although there are
thousands of talented students who are interested in programming but not able to learn it by themselves.
Though, books and notes in Hugarian and courses in English are availabe it seems insufficent for most of them.
Portals such as CodeAcademy, CodeSchool or Code Avengers that teach different programming languages in
interactive way in English might be useful. In Hungary, this type of portal, that teaches C++, Java and C#,
is not available, for instance learning C++ or C# languages in Hungarian for free is impossible. For example,
memmoc.hu portal of University of Miskolc only offers C and Java language courses [Kusper2016]. Algorithms
can be learned from books but gaining experince for their usage require solving problems and coding them in a
computer language. To do so, however, the knowledge of a programming language syntax is elementary.
kodolosuli.hu portal wishes to solve this problem. In this website, students can learn how to code basic algoritms
in a chosen language that can be C#, C++ or Java for free. The main objective of this site is to teach students the
basic programming structures that are necessary to be able to pass the advanced level exam of informatics. After
completing the course on the website they will be able to use an IDE (Integrated Development Environment)
and solve programming tasks. The programming knowledge gained from this portal can be enough for students
to understand programming resources on the internet and they can achive more in this field.
kodolosuli.hu teaches and traines the usage of the essential lexical unit and the control stuctures, how to make
and use procedures and functions including the built-in functions of languages, and the way of applying standard
I/O statements, methods. It also introduces the way of storing data in records, and that they can be stored
even in arrays or lists. The tools of exception handling are also discussed in all the three courses through
practical problems. Gamification applications provide motivation and make the understanding easier and faster
[Sailer2013]. The practical problems are mostly related to the field of making computer game programs. This
portal is developed for expressly Hungarian students.
2 Learning and practicing in this site
In an online environment students’ achievements can be influenced by several factors that stem from their features.
These factors can be for example their ability to maintain their attention or their intrinsic motivation [Biggs2012].
One of the most important factors that must be considered in terms of their activity is students’ engagement:
this can be defined as the student’s cognitive process, active participation and emotional involvement in the
learning process [Pellas2014]. In an online environment it is also important to increase the student’s cognitive
involvement [Wolf2007]. According to various e-learning objectives e-learning environments can be differentiated
[Clark-Mayer2011]. In kodolosuli.hu directive e-learning is preferred since the material of this site is supposed
to be new for the participants.
After login, students need to choose a language they wish to learn. The material to be learned can be found
on the left side of the screen. The exercise belonging to the current topic is on the right side. (Figure 1)
Students are asked to write the proper code in the panel on the right side. After the coding is completed,
clicking on the Send button uploads the solution. If it is correct the next unit will be displayed. If the code is
not correct a message including the number of the line that contains the error will be displayed. By clicking on
Help button the program makes instructions available for the student to be able to correct the mistake. If the
student fails an exercise he can move on to another unit for now and come back later to try again. Typically,
there is more than one exercise for each topic. Students’ attempts are stored in a database so teachers can even
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Figure 1: The main user interface of the portal. The curriculum is on the left side, the exercise and the code
panel are on the right side
help them with the solution.
The goal is to learn coding in a chosen language alone in order to be able to code the basic computer pro-
gramming problems (searching, selection, counting, etc.). There are several units that do not contain theoretical
material just practical exercises from real life. For example, finding the closest defibrillator to save a life; con-
trolling the parking sensor of a car; how to move a character from a given X,Y coordinate to another position as
fast as possible.
19 gamified applications have been developed for students to test their knowledge in a given topic during playing
with them. One of them can be seen on Figure 2. These software not only foster the motivation but provide
faster understanding [Domı́nguez2013][Khaleel2015].
Figure 2: Drop the ball into the green bucket. IGAZ=TRUE, HAMIS=FALSE.
Naturally, the portal contains a Forum for users to communicate with each other on a variety of subjects and
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to share their experience gained during coding, or they can collaborate with each other [Arefin2015][McDowell-
Werner-Bullock-FernaldKumar2012][Teague-Roe2008]. By reading this forum, teachers can help students, im-
prove the system and remove bugs from the programs.
The exercise repository that is part of the system contains several tasks that are not available for the students
during the course except for tests and exams. Exercises can be selected by either teachers or the system. Stu-
dents who completed all the tasks can download a computer game for both Android and Windows platforms.
Naturally, different game programs have been developed for both platforms for all the three languages.
3 The developed Learning Management System
The website has been written in PHP5 according to the MVC pattern. The curriculum, the users’ data and
their acts are stored in a MYSQL database in 17 tables as opposed to the game applications that can be found
in folders.
Currently, there are two types of users who can access to the system. Students and the administrator. Students
can reach only the curriculum unlike the administrator who has full access to both the materials and the users’
data.
3.1 The admin interface
Users logged in as administrator can create new languages, new curriculums and new exercises or edit the
previous ones and change the order of the units presented for students. (See Figure 3) It is possible to see
the students’ solutions, and this way the difficulty level of the exercises and the mistakes can be analysed
as well. It also records that how many times a unit was opened and how often tried a student to solve an exercise.
Figure 3: Access to all chapters
The system logs all the actions users perform so the publication of the achievements becomes easier, and it
helps the developers improve the curriculum. (Figure 4)
3.2 The graders
The most important parts of the system besides the curriculum are the graders. There are two types of graders:
the first one examines the code line by line to see whether it is the same as the solution. This is the reason why
exercises are defined precisely, e.g. the name of the loop variable is also specified. (Figure 5) The purpose of this
method is to get the students to use ”speaking variable names” and practice the right coding style. However, in
some cases this grader could cause problems especially when longer codes are given, because it might not accept
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Figure 4: Tracking a user’s activities
codes with correct syntax and semantics. Furthermore, the description of the exercise might be too long due to
the very strict spefication.
Figure 5: Grader in action. The curriculum is on the left side, the exercise and the code panel are on the right
side. In this case, the second line is incorrect.
When users are getting familiar with coding algorithms they need to solve more complex practical problems,
therefore this grader cannot be used. That is why another type of grader is used for longer codes and exercises. It
first compiles the submitted code, and then, if no compile error have occurred, it executes this code for different
test data stored in files. For each task, input and output files are available and are used by this grader to test
the code. Naturally, users are informed about the correctness of the submitted programs.
Programs, coded and submitted by students, are executed (after the compilation) in a sandboxed environment
also used in the portal of progcheck.nejanet.hu [Kiraly-Szekely2015]. The default memory and execution time
limit are taken into account and enforced but these constraints can be changed for each task. Students are
informed about the memory and execution time their submissions use up while if they overstep the limits an
error message is presented for them. The submitted programs cannot access neither the memory nor the hard
disk directly. Programs that try to break the rules are not executed at all.
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4 The gamified curricculum
Students sometimes find it hard to learn a programming language. They are often confronted with unfamiliar
programming terms and are required to visualize the processes that happen in computer memory. Others find
this a burden and end up memorizing the processes without understanding them.
Figure 6: Boardgame that helps in summarizing the topics
This situation invariably leads students to get low grades in their programming subjects and abandon
learning programming. Studies have shown that applying gamification elements in websites engage users
[Fotaris-Mastoras-Leinfellner-Rosunally2015]. Games are engaging because they have the potential to satisfy
basic psychological needs for competence and autonomy [Li-Dong-Unitch-Chasteen2016].
Figure 7: Hangman for memorizing keywords
The most important games have been implemented in HTML5 and JavaScript and put in iframe. The images
of games are either drawn on a HTML5 Canvas during execution or loaded from the hard drive before running
the code. For the most games, the JQuery library is also used.
Games are not only motivating but also filled with educational content. The experience gained from the current
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game is not enough, this experience must be transformed to educational experience [Garris-Ahlers-Driskell2002].
After games, the site offers real coding tasks relating to the game. When students are playing with these
games they not only play but also learn the given topic [Ben-Ari2013][Kumar2012]. Traditional games such as
Boardgame (Figure 6) Hangman (Figure 7), ) and Memory cards have also been implemented.
The more complicated exercises involve students to code algoritms of computer games. For example, they need
to write a code that can control the descent of a spacecraft onto a planet. The submitted solutions for these
problems are evaluated by the second type of grader.
5 Conclusions and Future Work
The aim of this study is to demonstrate a novel website, kodolosuli.hu, that is an online interactive platform
that offers free coding classes in 3 different programming languages. The goal is to reach youngsters who have
little-to-no coding experience, but wish to learn. The website starts by presuming no prior knowledge at all,
and lets students work through small exercises and slowly growing in complexity. This website offers gamified
curriculum. Gamification refers to the use of game elements in a non-game context to increase engagement
between humans and computers. The implemented game programs not only increase the effectiveness of learning
but enhance students’ understanding. As the more complicated exercises are related to the implementation of
different game programs they also increase the engagement of students in learning programming. The successful
students who complete the course of a given computer language are allowed to download a game program for
both Android and Windows platforms that is not available anywhere else.
The developed LMS and Forum support keeping track of student progress during lessons and foster the improve-
ment of the material.
It is planned to give the system the following function: instead of the two types of user solution (student and
administrator) there will be a teacher type of user who cannot create curriculums, but they can create classes
and add students to the system by themselves. They can upload their own tests for practice, or they can give
homework, which are corrected by the system automatically.
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