Avaliação da utilização de leaderboards em disciplinas introdutórias de programação.

Abstract

Among the important practices to students of introductory programming is the exercise solving. There are programming courses that offer a large set of problems to students. Despite this availability, there are cases of courses that have students that are not motivated to solve these problems. Gamification is the use of game elements and dynamics in nongame contexts and recently has been considered to be a possible solution for the problem of disengagement of students on educational contexts. One of the game elements used in gamified contexts is the leaderboard. The leaderboards are charts that shows individuals ranked accordingly to a score criteria and creates competition environments that may stimulate studentstobemoreactive. In this work, we propose and evaluate a leaderboarddes ign for introductory programming courses, in order to motivate the students to solve more programming exercises. We elicited requisites based on the positive and negative aspects of leaderboards and made design decisions for fulfill those requirements. The evaluation of the design is done through an short-length experiment and a longitudinal study during a semester. We found evidences that the leaderboards have a positive effecton the students,motivating them to do more exercises. The attribution of the same score for all exercises allowed more students tore achhighranks on the leaderboards. The implantation of short-lengthleaderboards motivated less-active students on the course, even for a few days.