Skilled programmers are in high demand in the European Union countries, and the key obstacle to satisfying this demand is the difficulty in learning programming.
We believe progress in this area can be attained with the combined use of automated assessment, which provides fast feedback to the students experimenting with their code, and gamification, which provides additional motivation for the students to intensify their learning effort.
In our opinion, the availability of programming courses based on such an approach may improve the effectiveness of learning programming and extend the group of people who feel capable of effectively learning it.
Nonetheless, there are no available open collections of gamified programming exercises, no open interactive programming learning environment that would support such exercises, and no open standard for representing such exercises so that they could be developed in different educational institutions and shared among them.
