Increasing motivation with gamification

I want to explore ways we can reward success to encourage better performance. For example there could be a page dedicated to statistics, progress, achievements, etc. Or we could show some rewarding graphics or animations on some occassions, like the confetti that currently shows when a user gets an output prediction question right.

Here are some things we can currently measure. I'm sure some of these are bad ideas, but I'm going to list everything I can think of just to get brain juices flowing:

- Number of steps/exercises/pages completed
- Exercises solved without looking at:
- any hints
- more than X hints
- any kind of solution, including Parsons problems
- the gradual reveal solution, regardless of how much was revealed
- more than X% of the solution revealed
- Steps completed without copy pasting
- Outputs predicted correctly
- On the first guess
- Within two guesses
- Speed of completing steps/exercises
- Number of attempts to complete an exercise

An idea that really excites me is to encourage the user to explore and experiment and reward them for discovering new concepts, especially if they discover something before it's been covered in the course. For example, we could reward discovering:

- Any new error message, whether syntax or runtime. Trying to break things is a great sign.
- Mathematical operators, parentheses, floating point numbers, negative numbers, any calculation that produces a number with more than 20 digits...
- Nested things: loops, if statements, function definitions, function calls, lists...

Thoughts? Ideas?