An effective technique to support sustainable learning is distributed practice, a method shown to enhance long-term knowledge retention. As part of our research agenda, we aim to investigate suitable design strategies for eLearning courses that support distributed practice through intrinsic motivation. Our most recent strategy followed the idea of linking the acquisition of badges gained by completing a set of quizzes with a small extrinsic reward, a small bonus in the exam grade. We built a course with quizzes and timed badges with staged deadlines for the badges to ensure students do the quizzes during the semester and not shortly before the exam. An initial evaluation of this course design yielded encouraging results. The assessment showed that students learned a great deal from the quizzes and were highly motivated by the quizzes and by receiving the badges. Qualitative feedback highlighted increased motivation, increased engagement, and lower levels of perceived stress among students, who attributed these changes to the platform's ability to make learning more enjoyable and less monotonous. This paper argues that the strategic use of gamification in engineering education can significantly support distributed practice by creating an interactive, motivating, and supportive learning environment.

For teaching agile methods in an IT undergraduate course we built up a gamified blended learning course. We created the course with gamification elements like videos, quizzes, badges, and points within the learning management system Moodle. To do so we used a gamification concept based on MDA (Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics). The goal of the gamification concept was to increase intrinsic motivation of the students. We evaluated the motivation of our students with a questionnaire that is based on the psychological motivation theory STD (Self Determination Theory). The paper will shortly show how we built up the course in Moodle, and also gives some details on the used plugins and gamification elements. The main focus is on the evaluation which was done using a standardized questionnaire on intrinsic motivation built upon SDT at the beginning and at the end of our course. 39 students participated before taking the course and 16 after the completion of the course. The evaluation shows that some elements in the course like Videos and quizzes increase the motivation clearly whereas others do not. We could show an increase of intrinsic motivation in some factors of the questionnaire we used, but not in all factors.

In this paper we describe the evolution of a gamified course on agile methods and Scrum in software engineering teaching at university. The course covers among other topics, agile project management and scrum. For knowledge tranfer we used different gamification approaches in this course over the years, including point based gamification and story based gamification but also simple approaches like quizzes. The gamified e-learning course was realized with the learning management system Moodle. We describe how the course was built up in moodle, give some technical details on the used plugins and gamification elements. We describe our experiences with the different gamification approaches and give some lessons learned.

The proper design of Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs is not trivial because developers have to deal with a flood of recommendations and best practices, especially the proper application of the hypermedia constraint requires some decent experience.Furthermore, testing RESTful APIs is a missing topic within literature.Especially hypermedia testing is not mentioned at all.Manual hypermedia testing is time-consuming and hard to maintain.Testing a hypermedia API requires many test cases that have similar structure, especially when different user roles and error cases are considered.In order to tackle this problem, we proposed a Model-Driven Testing (MDT) approach for hypermedia systems using the metamodel within our existing Model Driven Software Development (MDSD) approach.This work discusses challenges and results of hypermedia testing for RESTful APIs using MDT techniques that were discovered within our research.MDT allows white-box testing, hence covering complete program structure and behavior of the generated application.By doing this, we are able to achieve a high automated test coverage.Moreover, any