The OSCAR platform is an open-source digital environment designed to support online and hybrid coding camps, enabling collaborative learning, structured assessment, and student engagement across Europe.
Developed and validated through real educational use cases, the platform supports the full lifecycle of a coding camp—from preparation and delivery to assessment and post-event reporting.
The project’s reference platform implementation is based on the TIM platform developed at the University of Jyväskylä. TIM has been used in teaching at JYU and other Finnish universities since 2014 and it continues being actively developed in an agile, iterative process based on shareholder feedback and needs.
The TIM platform is open source, which encourages participation, experimentation and iterative development of both the platform and the coding camps using it.
A quick guideline is published here.
High school students aged 15-19 with little or no software development skills
High school students aged 15-19 who attended previous editions of the coding camps
Coding camp teachers, e.g., lecturers, researchers, or enthusiasts of computer science-related topics
Manager of the coding camp, e.g., researchers or enthusiasts of computer science-related topics
They are members of the Oscar project.
Core Functionalities to support hybrid coding camp
The platform aims to facilitate the organization of online or hybrid coding camps by recommending specific tools to support the entire software development process, with a focus on team collaboration.
During the project, several new features (such as badges to reward project milestones, good teamwork etc.) have already been added to the platform, and more are being worked on.
Assessment tools
The OSCAR reference platform provides assessment tools that support automatic document generation based on evaluation data as well as exporting evaluation data to different formats. The assessment tools were formulated as multiple-choice tasks with a certain range of answers, from which the assessor chooses one. The choices were automatically saved.
A feature of the platform enables Coding camp staff (coordinators, facilitators, teachers) to create and award badges to students and student teams. This type of gamification element can help to encourage and motivate students. A leaderboard can be displayed to students, further enhancing motivation to participate via playful competition. The badges can be customized by the coding camp staff.
Generating certificates for coding camp attendees programmatically reduces post-event workload for coding camp organizers and is likely relatively easy to develop. This feature is currently under development and will be available to coding camp staff in future implementations.
Multi-lingual use is enabled by document translations, with the ability to also use the AI-based translation service DeepL (registration required to obtain API key for the TIM platform). Localization of the platform’s user interface elements currently supports English, Finnish and Swedish. Additional localizations will be added depending on user demand. Localizations for Italian and Spanish will be added during the OSCAR project.
OSCAR
ERASMUS-EDU-2023-PI-FORWARD Project number: 101132432
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