Applying Gamification to Motivate Students to Write High-Quality Code in Programming Assignments

Background: Traditional programming education focuses on training students' ability to write correct code that meets the specifications in programming assignments. In addition to correctness, software engineering studies argue that code quality is important. Problem: Nurturing students' ability to write high-quality code in programming assignments is difficult due to two main reasons. (1) Considering code quality while grading is undesirable because there are no objective and fair measurement metrics. (2) Grading assignments from multiple viewpoints (correctness and quality) is difficult and time-consuming. Approach: We propose applying gamification with code metrics to measure code quality in programming assignments. Our approach can motivate students to write code with good metric scores independent of grading. We implemented our approach and conducted a control experiment in a programming course at a university. Result: Our approach did not interfere with students' submissions but improved metric scores significantly. Hence, our approach can engage students to write high-quality code.