VIII. CONCLUSIONS
Code Hunt is a powerful and versatile platform for coding as a game. It is unique in that requires players to work out what to do from unit tests, rather than giving them a specification. This aspect of Code Hunt adds to the fun, and can be mined in contests. In this paper we described how contests are set up and some of the challenges in ensuring that puzzles are correctly rated. The sheer numbers of players (tens of thousands) make it possible to test hypotheses and come to reasonable conclusions about how players are mastering coding, and what holds them up. In future work, we are going to perfect the course experience, and also add a club experience, augmenting the doit-yourself contest process described above. In the back end, we have a system in place that generates hints when users are stuck: it is currently under testing and will be rolled out soon. At the moment, only C# and Java are supported on Code Hunt. Java programs are actually source translated to C# programs. We have plans to include Python using the same mechanism very soon. Finally, a responsibility of large games such as these is to keep them fresh. The contests contribute to this, but it is also necessary to periodically update the default zone. A refresh is planned for January 2015. Naturally, care will be taken to preserve the data on sequentially ordering of puzzles so we can continue to delve into it and find out more about how students learn with games.