This paper discusses the effect of a gamified learning system for students of the master course on Web Design and Programming performed at the Faculty of Organization and Informatics. A new set of usability metrics was derived from web-based learning usability, user experience and instructional design literature and incorporated into the questionnaire which consists of three main categories: Usability, Educational Usability and User Experience. The main contribution of this paper is the development and validation of a questionnaire for measuring the usability of a gamified e-learning course from students’ perspective. Usability practitioners can use the developed metrics with confidence when evaluating the design of a gamified e-learning course in order to improve students’ engagement and motivation.

Grading student programming assignments is not an easy task. This task is even more challenging when talking about complex programming assignments at university graduate level. By complex assignments, we mean assignments where students have to program a complete application from scratch. For example, building a complete web application with a client and server side, whereby the application uses multiple threads that gather data from some external service (like the REST service, IoT sensors, etc.), processes these data and store them in some storage (e.g., a database), implements a custom protocol over a socket or something similar, implements their own REST/SOAP/GraphQL service, then sends or receives JMS/MQTT/WebSocket messages, etc. Such assignments give students an inside view of building real Internet applications. On the other hand, assignments like these take a long time to be tested and graded manually, e.g., up to 1 h per student. To speed up the assessment process, there are different automation possibilities that can check for the correctness of some application parts without endangering the grading quality. In this study, different possibilities of automation are described that have been improved over several years. This process takes advantage of unit testing, bash scripting, and other methods. The main goal of this study is to define an assessment process that can be used to grade complex programming assignments, with concrete examples of what and how to automate. This process involves assignment preparation for automation, plagiarism (i.e., better said similarity) detection, performing an automatic check of the correctness of each programming assignment, conducting an analysis of the obtained data, the awarding of points (grading) for each programming assignment, and other such activities. We also discuss what the downsides of automation are and why it is not possible to completely automate the grading process.

Code similarity tools are widely used in programming courses to support academic integrity, yet fixed percentage cut-offs are often applied without considering how score distributions vary across assignments, academic years, and detection tools. This study examines similarity patterns over three academic years (2023/2024–2025/2026) using two programming assignments and two detection tools. For each assignment-year-tool combination, we analysed empirical pairwise score distributions using central, dispersion, threshold-based, and upper-tail indicators. Because submissions occur in multiple pairs, we also performed a submission-level robustness analysis using per-submission mean, median, and maximum similarity. Assignment A1 showed descriptively higher central similarity in later academic years, and this pattern remained visible at the submission level, whereas Assignment A2 showed smaller year-to-year differences, particularly for JPlagJava. Maximum scores decreased across years for both tools, but broader upper-tail indicators decreased for JPlagJava and showed mixed patterns for SIMGruneJava. These differences are interpreted descriptively rather than as statistically established temporal changes. The findings support a context-aware, distribution-based interpretation of similarity scores rather than reliance on a single fixed threshold, accounting for assignment characteristics, year-to-year patterns, and tool-specific behaviour.

This paper explores the usage and awareness of free and open-source software(FOSS) among university students attending several study programs at the Facultyof Organization and Informatics (FOI) of the University of Zagreb and the Facultyof Teacher Education (FTE) of the University of Zagreb. Using the data collectedvia an online questionnaire on the sample of 777 students and the descriptiveand inferential statistics, an analysis was carried out to determine whether therespondents are familiar with the key features of FOSS, whether they use someFOSS, whether they are aware of the advantages of FOSS, which features of FOSSare the most important to them, and how they evaluate the quality of FOSS. Thedata were analysed using the statistics FOSS GNU PSPP and R. The research resultsshow that 92.66 % of the respondents use some kind of FOSS, 28.99 % are awarethat they are using FOSS with all its features, and the most important FOSS featurefor the respondents is that it is often cost-free. There are significant differencesin the respondents’ familiarity with FOSS and the number of FOSS operatingsystems users in terms of their faculty and gender. On a scale from 1 (insufficient)to 5 (excellent), the respondents’ rating of FOSS reliability was 3.74, completeness3.68, and overall quality 3.74. The research results indicate the need for additionaleducation of students about FOSS, and its advantages and disadvantages.Key words: FOSS adoption; FOSS awareness; FOSS quality.---SažetakU ovom radu istražuje se korištenje i svijest o slobodnom softveru otvorenoga izvornogkoda (Free and Open Source Software - FOSS) među studentima koji pohađajunekoliko studijskih programa na Sveučilištu u Zagrebu, Fakultetu organizacije iinformatike (FOI) i Sveučilištu u Zagrebu Učiteljskom fakultetu (UF). Koristećipodatke prikupljene online anketnim upitnikom na uzorku od 777 studenata tedeskriptivnu i inferencijalnu statistiku analizira se jesu li ispitanici upoznati sključnim značajkama FOSS-a, koriste li neki FOSS, jesu li upoznati s prednostimakoje FOSS donosi, koja su im obilježja FOSS-a najvažnija te kako ocjenjuju kvalitetuFOSS-a. Podatci se analiziraju pomoću statističkoga FOSS-a GNU PSPP i R. Rezultatiistraživanja pokazuju da 92,66 % ispitanika koristi neki FOSS, 28,99 % je svjesnoda koristi FOSS sa svim njegovim značajkama, a ispitanicima je najvažnije obilježjeFOSS-a da je često besplatan. Postoje statistički značajne razlike u upoznatostiispitanika s FOSS-om i broju korisnika operacijskih sustava iz svijeta FOSS-a sobzirom na fakultet i spol ispitanika. Na ljestvici od 1-nedovoljno do 5-izvrsno,ispitanici ocjenjuju pouzdanost FOSS-a ocjenom 3,74, kompletnost ocjenom 3,68, aopću kvalitetu ocjenom 3,74. Rezultati istraživanja ukazuju na potrebu za dodatnimobrazovanjem studenata o FOSS-u te njegovim prednostima i nedostatcima.Ključne riječi: kvaliteta FOSS-a; svijest o FOSS-u; usvajanje FOSS-a.