Applying Gamification in a Parallel Programming Course

Abstract

Pursuing a college degree is a task that requires a great amount of time and effort. Universities are facing a big challenge to attract students and keep them motivated. The gamification of education is a practice that expects to increase the students' engagement, which in turn increases learning outcomes. Nevertheless, obtaining beneficial results from gamification requires educators to mold the teaching to include this new practice, usually involving a lot of effort. In this chapter, the authors present a new software tool developed to encourage gamification dynamics, and they describe their experience using this tool in a Parallel Programming course. The chapter describes the structure of the course, the different proposed activities, the organization of hardware resources, the design of the developed software tool, and an evaluation of the gamified course. The results show that the use of gamification techniques has been a great success. The authors have had a very positive response from their students, and there has been also a big percentage of passing students.