Fic WebBoard: A Playful and Collaborative Learning Platform Built for All People and All Programming Languages

In this paper we introduce FicWebBoard, a learning concept and accompanying online platform that allows teaching programming languages to highly heterogeneous groups of students. Students are given great freedom, in particular in their choice of programming languages, but not at the cost of the quality of supervision as they are still under a certain hidden control. Gamification and the opportunity to participate to a challenge (an optional competition), also help to make the concept attractive to students. This original approach targets students with basic knowledge about programming, and allows them to earn deeper or wider programming knowledge. To validate the approach, we designed a survey to collect feedback from past students after using this approach for seven years.