POLYGLOT for Gamified Education: Mixing Modelling and Programming Exercises

Gamification refers to the employment of gaming mechanisms for non-gaming purposes. Its aim is promoting the engagement of target users in pursuing certain goals, e.g. completing education paths. In this paper we present POLYGLOT, a gamified notebook-like programming environment. The gamification extension was built to target programming languages education, and in this work we illustrate how the approach is adaptable to text-based modelling languages. In particular, we demonstrate the use of gamification tailored to SysML v2 modelling.Each exercise is defined as a sequence of steps framed into notebook cells. On each cell submission, the POLYGLOT extension for.NET interactive runs several analyzers to gain insights of the student code before invoking the gamification engine, which checks if the gathered data fits the teacher-defined expectations. Interestingly, since cell contents are language independent and exercise evaluations are delegated to the gamification engine, this solution enables the creation of heterogeneous narratives, that is gamification scenarios mixing languages in the proposed exercises.