The FGPE++ project aimed at increasing the educational potential of the FGPE framework by enhancing its usability for both students and teachers. This aim has been attained by achieving three objectives: (1) enabling the automatic generation of gamified programming exercises so that any teacher could create them with no prior knowledge of gamification and even using the tool for the first time; (2) enabling the effective use of the FGPE programming learning environment on mobile devices which are, for some period, disconnected from the Internet (by providing an in-browser automatic evaluation of students' submissions without verifying them on the server); (3) developing a full open online course for Data Analysis in Python that could be used as is by the project partners and other institutions reaping the benefits of the LTI support introduced in the FGPE Plus project. All three objectives contribute to better usability of the FGPE platform and make it address a wider gamut of user needs, both teachers' and students'.
We applied for this project to address the problem of the difficulty of learning and teaching of computer programming. This problem is important at various levels, for European Union (as the demand for software developers in Europe still surpasses the supply), for educational institutions involved in teaching programming (particularly including the project partners) as the failure to pass programming classes is often a reason for students to drop out of computer science studies, and for the individual members of the project team who face the students' problems directly in the programming classes they teach themselves. While a progress in addressing the problem with gamification has been achieved with the FGPE and FGPE Plus projects, the barriers in further adoption of their results have become visible: teachers who lacked time and/or creative skills were reluctant to gamify their programming lessons, the power of mobile learning has been unerutilized as submitting students' solutions required sustained Internet connection, and the support for LTI remained a technologiczal opportunity that has not yet been effectively consumed due to the limited resources of the FGPE Plus project.