An Open CS1 Learning Platform to Promote and Incentivize Deliberate Practice

Students often find CS1 to be difficult and the workload too demanding. Those who are struggling may lose marks on assessments due to knowledge gaps, slips, or simply a lack of time. Meanwhile, other students demand more practice questions to better prepare for upcoming exams. To mitigate these differences, we developed an open learning platform that combines ideas from mastery learning, concept mapping, and gamification. The main feature of this work is an open question bank with over 1,500 multiple-choice questions, Parsons problems, and programming exercises for CS1. Using our platform, students can earn tokens by solving questions in multiple ways, including free-form practice, setting personal goals, and completing challenges individually or in teams. Our platform also has a leaderboard to promote engagement and personal analytics to foster self-regulated learning and deliberate practice. Initial feedback from over 500 students has been encouraging. Ultimately, we hope that our system can accommodate different student preferences in how they want to learn and practice programming.