The concept of gamification could be described as the use of game design elements in a non-game context, with the aim that users of a gamified application do not realize that they are doing hard or difficult work but have fun as if they were playing a game. Gamification is one of the most successful approaches in education today, as the use of gamification elements increases students' motivation, engagement and active participation in the learning process, leading to more successful achievement of learning outcomes. This paper presents ongoing research on the use of gamification in education aimed at motivating students and increasing their engagement to improve learning outcomes. The overall aim was to design and develop a gamified system for learning programming and to test its success. The paper describes the self-developed gamified system Codey for Python programming, which includes numerous gamification features to motivate students to master difficult topics related to programming. The most important gamification features implemented are XP (experience points), daily goals, leaderboard, number of days of use (streak), short lessons and code puzzles. Adaptivity was also implemented, i.e. feedback to students after exercises/lessons, repetition of incorrectly answered exercises, adjustment of students' scores, adjustment of the difficulty of tasks and adaptive lessons. The functionality of the system was tested in two phases: Alpha testing to align the intuitiveness of the application with User Experience (UX)/ User Interface (UI) principles, and beta testing with students to test the effectiveness of gamification for learning programming. The research questions were formulated to find out whether the developed gamified system is intuitive to use from a UX/UI perspective and whether the use of a gamified system contributes to greater student engagement in learning programming. The study was conducted in a primary school to test the effectiveness of gamification on student engagement. The results obtained show some evidence of the effectiveness of the use of gamification, but there is a need to continue systematic research on gamification in schools so that the prototype of the gamified system presented is further developed and tested.

In this paper, we describe various STEM outreach activities conducted at the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (UNIZG-FER), as well as the results of a survey conducted among faculty students to determine if and how our activities have contributed to their choice of studies and future careers. For more than 12 years, the UNIZG-FER has systematically organized activities related to the popularization of science and STEM outreach, through a series of events, lectures, workshops, and student visits. Annually, through various activities, we directly engage with several thousand children of various ages, from preschoolers to high school students who are in the process of selecting which college to enroll in. Some of these students have chosen to continue their studies at our faculty, so we ran a questionnaire among freshmen and sophomore students to better understand whether and to what extent our activities influenced their enrollment choices. The results show that the majority of students participated in some of our activities through their pre-university education. Although students generally state that these activities were not crucial in their choice of faculty, they believe that the activities strengthened their decision and intensified their positive attitude towards STEM fields in general.

This Research to Practice Work In Progress paper presents our experience and preliminary results of introducing adaptive and gamified digital learning lessons to lower primary school students. To improve motivation and engagement, besides the adaptivity of the learning content itself, the game elements like points, and rewards were added to the learning lessons. Additionally, the activities supported two different game modes, adventure and competitive. In adventure mode, students were solving the assigned tasks to discover interesting new facts about the world around them, and in the competitive mode, they were collecting points and trophies to beat their classmates.The preliminary study was conducted with two small groups of third-grade students (age 8-9, N=18) who used tablet computers to access and complete the prepared mathematics learning activities. A questionnaire was organized to collect additional information and student attitudes toward each of the approaches.The preliminary results show that personalized gamification has the potential to improve student engagement, which could, eventually, lead to more successful learning.

In this work in progress paper we present an example of innovative practice in organizing informal STEM education workshops with young children. The workshops were divided into two learning scenarios, unplugged programming and hands-on robot play. Unplugged programming encourages understanding of the core concepts of programming such as algorithms and computational thinking rather than focusing on the programming language. In the second learning scenario, pupils were introduced to two educational robots used as a learning tool - Thymio and Codey Rocky. The aim of the second activity was linking the programming concept to a real-world scenario. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected using pre- and post- questionnaires. The pre-questionnaires contained questions about the pupils' background knowledge, i.e. basic concepts of programming and robotics. The post-questionnaires were designed to evaluate the workshops impact on the pupils' perception of these observed concepts and their overall satisfaction with the workshops. Combining unplugged activities with robots helps bridging the gap between imagination and reality, therefore improving learning.

In this paper we present two programs for underrepresented Spanish minorities: Model Institute for Excellence (MIE) and Broader Participation in Computing-Alliance (BPC-A). MIE was a National Science Foundation funded program ran in Puerto Rico, whereas BPC-A was a project designed to impact Hispanic American institutions in Puerto Rico and the African Americans in the US Virgin Islands. Both programs enabled pre-college students to participate in early research, during which they learned from mentors how to conduct research using university facilities - going through the whole research cycle starting from documentation, formulation of a research question up to giving oral presentations or making posters, which were then presented in a research symposium. The programs also affected undergraduates through an intensive ten-week summer research program at partner institutions in both the US and internationally. Mentoring by faculty and peer mentoring produced very positive outcomes in transferring these undergraduates to graduate schools: over 300 Bachelor of Science degrees in Science, Engineering, and Mathematics and 130 undergraduates went to graduate schools (70 Master of Science and 60 PhD).

For a number of years, various games have been used as an educational tool at different academic levels, especially in primary education. However, only recently games that teach coding and algorithmic thinking or even broader, computational thinking, emerged. Initiatives like Hour of Code and similar online activities or block-based programming games popularized the field, while at the same time, projects like CSUnplugged showed that the “idea of programming” can be learned even without using the computer. In this paper, we present our experience so far in creating and implementing different unplugged activities that teach students of different age levels, from early primary school to the university students, the simple programming concepts and algorithms. As a part of Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (STEM-C) outreach program named SUZA - From school to science and the academic community at University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, Croatia, we conducted a number of game-like activities based on graph paper programming, block-based programming and using the existing board games. Although this is a work in progress project, the participant reactions so far, collected through interviews and questionnaires, indicated that the conducted activities were well accepted by students and their teachers. We also received a number of useful feedback comments and proposals, such as to expand the activities to include the homework part, or to make them more physical and relocate them outdoors.

Today it is already widely accepted that out of school education exceeds formal education in content and knowledge and that it is not a plus, but a necessity. However, unlike formal education, educators working in informal settings are often volunteers or/and they do those activities on top of their daily jobs. The research questions we pose here are (i) what motivates people to volunteer in K-12 Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (STEM-C) informal education, (ii) what could help to motivate people who are currently demotivated, and finally (iii) what we can do not only to attract new volunteers, but also to retain the current ones. We collected and analyzed opinions of faculty staff, students and volunteers involved in K-12 STEM-C outreach activities conducted at University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, Croatia where five years ago, we started our outreach program named SUZA - From school to science and the academic community. The results of our research study show a wide span of reasons why (and why not) people volunteer in our activities, together with their general attitudes toward K-12 STEM-C outreach activities. Although the results are mostly in line with research in the field, there are some specifics which could relate to specifics of volunteering in K-12 STEM-C fields and could benefit wider community.

This paper describes two mobile learning journeys in the zoo using either smartphones or tablets, and a mobile learning application SamEx, all designed and implemented as part of a research study in a Singapore primary school. Out-of-school semi-formal learning activities such as zoo trips present standard curricular topics where students go out of their schools in order to explore topics of interest in a semi-controlled designed environment. Typically, students observe and connect their observations with prior knowledge or further extend their knowledge on the go or later with their teacher in the classroom. The initial study in 2013 included the whole Primary 3 (P3) level of students, 305 of them, while the subsequent study in 2015 included 321 students. Between the years technology shift was inevitable — the participating school switched from smartphone devices to tablet computers, where each child has a tablet with the option to connect to both a WiFi network and to a mobile broadband network. Furthermore, the changes in the design of the mobile learning SamEx application were carried out in collaboration with the teachers, through a design-based research process. SamEx allows for the collection, organization and storage of media collected by students typically as responses to questions and prompts set up by their teachers. The initial design was oriented towards individual students, to support their individual in-class and homework learning tasks and assignments. The main features added to the application incorporated additional teachers' needs in carrying out curricular topics including inquiry learning and collaborative learning. The paper explores the evolution of both technology and the implementation of the application in the period, and problematizes the notion of inevitable technology change, constant software maintenance and enhancement and the effect of these changes on learning activities and outcomes.

This paper problematizes the challenges of setting up a new mobile learning project in a Croatia, a country where technology-enhanced tools in classrooms are not often used due to a number of reasons, two of which are the lack of infrastructure and no teacher professional development. There are three focal points of this paper: designing scalable and durable mobile learning solution, working with teachers in order to ensure an adequate teacher development and creating appropriate digital contents to match primary school level 2, 3 and 4 curriculum. Scalable and durable mobile learning solutions in the context of this project include two main platforms: (1) a mobile learning tablet application for primary school students and (2) a designer application mainly aimed at digital contents designers and producers, to also be easily used by the teachers. On the other side, it describes the processes of strengthening digital competences of the participating school teachers, including technology competence, leadership capacity and technology supported curricular innovation processes. Thirdly, the issues of design and implementation of digital lessons are explored with a special focus on digitalization of the existing non-digital lessons together with the teachers, wherever appropriate and feasible. As a result, conceptual prototypes of digital lessons are produced to be analyzed and discussed amongst teachers and researchers, after which the selected ones get integrated into digital lessons for tablet computer. In addition to describing the threefold process and the accompanying issues, the paper presents preliminary experiences and results in this novel research initiative, sets up mid-term goals and proposes and adequate methodology in achieving the project goals.