Keeping Fun Alive: an Experience Report on Running Online Coding Camps
Ilenia Fronza, Luis Corral, Xiaofeng Wang, Claus Pahl

TL;DR
This paper reports on designing an online coding camp that maintains the same fun and educational quality as face-to-face camps, successfully engaging high school students in Agile practices during remote learning.
Contribution
It presents practical adaptations for online coding camps that preserve fun and learning outcomes, based on real-world experience and comparison with face-to-face versions.
Findings
Online camp kept the same fun level as face-to-face
Participants achieved similar quality in results
Adaptations increased engagement and reduced fatigue
Abstract
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic prohibited radically the collocation and face-to-face interactions of participants in coding bootcamps and similar experiences, which are key characteristics that help participants to advance technical work. Several specific issues are faced and need to be solved when running online coding camps, which can achieve the same level of positive outcomes for participants. One of such issues is how to keep the same level of fun that participants obtained through physical activities and interactions in the face-to-face settings. In this paper, we report on our experience and insights gained from designing and running a fully remote coding camp that exposes high school students to Agile-based Software Engineering practices to enhance their ability to develop high-quality software. To design the online coding camp, we adapted the face-to-face version of the…
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