Improving WebIDE through Delightful Design and Gamification

• Main Author: Hilton, Michael
• Format: Others
• Published: DigitalCommons@CalPoly 2013
• Subjects: Delight; WebIDE; Test Driven Development (TDD); gamification; Education; HCI; Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/theses/931; https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1985&context=theses

WebIDE is a web-based online learning environment. WebIDE has been used successfully to teach CS0 and CS1 students Java and C concepts and software engineering best practices, specically Test Driven Development. Previous Web- IDE development has concentrated on developing functionality. The main goal of this eort is to improve two non-functional aspects of WebIDE. The rst is to design a more delightful user interface. The second is to add a scoring mecha- nism that encourages students to develop best practices. The scoring mechanism rewards students who answer the question correctly on the rst attempt, dis- couraging them from spamming the answer button. Our objective is to motivate the students to think before answering. The innovations are evaluated through a semi-controlled experiment that was conducted during the Fall quarter of 2012 at Cal Poly.