With the fast pace of digitalization, the European Union needs adequate workforce trained in Information Technology (IT), especially the programmers who form the core of the software development industry. Unfortunately, the lack of workforce having needed skills in this area has been observed since years in the whole European Union. An obvious solution is to increase the efforts on programming education, especially encompassing the groups who are now underrepresented in the IT workforce. The main barrier, however, is the difficulty in learning programming as observed by various researchers.The project is motivated by the opportunity for a progress in passing this barrier created by the combined use of automated assessment, which provides fast feedback to the students experimenting with their code, and gamification, which provides additional motivation for the students to intensify their learning effort. Thus, programming can be learned in a less stressful way and becomes more achievable by students with less background education in the area. In the long term, it may help improve the perception of learning programming, drawing more people to this subject of education that would otherwise avoid it.The aim of the FGPE project was to provide a framework for application of gamification to programming education, primarily in higher education institutions. Five intellectual outputs were delivered: 1) a scheme for effective programming course gamification, including featured gamification concepts and rules of their application;2) a standardized way for exchanging programming exercises for interactive educational environments based on two formats:a) YAPExIL, covering the contents of programming exercises, such as: introduction, description of the problem, initial code, automatic test definition, feedback messages,b) GEdIL, covering the gamification-related data, such as: virtual rewards for solving the exercises, gamification rules that trigger them, and dependencies between exercises;3) a web tool (FGPE AuthorKit) for authoring, managing and sharing exercises in the above formats, and converting them from/to other formats;4) an interactive educational environment (FGPE PLE) able to process the exercises complying to YAPExIL/GEdIL formats, present them to the students via a web browser, automatically assess students' solutions, trigger defined gamification rules and generate relevant feedback;5) an open repository of 480 gamified programming exercises (each one available in English and in a selected national language) which can be used as they are or adopted to suit specific educational objectives.All the project outputs are freely available in the Internet under open source licenses. The delivered intellectual outputs were presented at multiplier events and educational conferences attaining positive feedback from the audience.The project results helped to change the way programming education is served - so far at the project partners, improving students' learning experience and paving the way for the expected long-term impact of improving the efficiency of programming education. The FGPE project results form a base that will be further extended in the ongoing FGPE+ project (2020-1-PL01-KA226-HE-095786).