Tablon

A tool to introduce gamification methodologies in computer science courses

Tablon is a tool designed to introduce gamification methodologies in computer programming courses. It is an on-line judge for programming contests, with added gamification features.

Tablon receives student codes through a connecting client provided with the tool. Tablon can be configured with different queues, that use their own compilation options and tools. It uses its own local queues or it can relay on  the Slurm queue management system to launch the compiled programs to the target machines configured for each queue.

It also provides leaderboard queues. This type of queues execute the codes with a test-bed of secret inputs, checking the results and registering the execution times reported and/or accumulating scores for each test. Each leaderboard shows a public ranking of the best scores and/or times obtained by each user. Tablon also shows the users evolution on the ranking during the contest, and provide other statistics that are used for special prizes, badges, and to implement other gamification techniques.

Please, reference the following paper if you need to cite Tablon.

Applying Gamification in a Parallel Programming Course. J. Fresno, A. Ortega-Arranz, H. Ortega-Arranz, A. Gonzalez-Escribano, D.R. Llanos. In Gamification-Based E-Learning Strategies for Computer Programming Education, Eds. Ricardo Alexandre Peixoto de Queirós, Mário Teixeira Pinto., Chapter 6, pag. 106-130, IGI Global, 2017

Other papers related to teaching methodology that use Tablon as a tool include:
Download Tablon:
Tablon3 v2.0

Tablon3 is a new release of Tablon that uses Python3. It has all the features of Tablon v8.0 with a refactored code, and a better security and efficiency.
Released: July 2022
Download: tablon3_v2.0 (8,0 MBytes)

Main changes in Tablon

v8 (2021): Unification of interfaces. Multiple tablon instances in the same server, to allow the navigation through the tablon results of previous courses.
v7 (2020): Full integration of performance and multi-score contests in the same leaderboard.
v6 (2019): Support for multi-score queues and connection with SonarQube for contests in Software Engineering courses.
v5 (2017): The first publicly released version of Tablon. Performance ranking for Parallel Computing courses.

Hermes 1.6

A tool to use Tablon in Discord, the VoIP, instant messaging and digital distribution platform designed for creating communities.
Hermes download page