A Gamified Approach to Achieve Excellence in Programming

In today's IT world, no one is untouched from its perpetual and accumulative impact as it keeps on revolutionizing our lives by making the things easy and comfortable. Undoubtedly, software is the key driving force behind it and has become the backbone of IT industry today. In-spite of huge success, still there are barriers causing hindrance in the swift growth of IT sector and that leads to failure of many large and high cost IT projects. The most important and foremost reason behind it is programming incompetency in the developers responsible for software development. This is the result of lack of interest and motivation in programming at learning stage during higher education. That's why majority of the students are not coming forward with full competence and capabilities to meet industry expectations. To alleviate this problem to some extent, we introduce a gamified approach in a game called ProLounge (Programming Lounge) - an online learning application. The purpose of inducting gamification is to increase students' engagement, motivation, and understanding using a fun filled gaming flavour and enjoyable learning environment, thus yielding high students' performance. ProLounge has proved to be a great learning source with fun for the students' community at large. The results have shown a strong preference for the use of gamification in imparting the programming knowledge.