Work In Progress: Sleuth, a programming environment for testing gamification

Sleuth is a gamified platform developed as a practical tool for teaching introductory programming to large student cohorts. It focuses on building fluency through repeated practice whilst developing syntactic and conceptual knowledge. The platform is currently used for online and campus-based teaching with around 1200 active students at any given time. In this paper we discuss Sleuth as an iterative testbed for empirically testing theoretical considerations around gamification and automated feedback generation. Further to this, we introduce ongoing research investigating effects of varying feedback types on student attainment and optimising student progression.