CS1, arcade games and the free java book

ABSTRACT Computer game programming has been adopted by some instructors and schools in an effort to motivate students and make the learning more relevant to the student's world than the console programs many of their instructors learned with. This paper describes the author's experience teaching CS1 using the ACM Java library to write arcade game programs. An online book, the Free Java Book, has been written to support this approach. Experience over the last two years teaching with this approach will be shared and the book will be described

Showing Up is Half the Battle: Assessing Different Contextualized Learning Tools to Increase the Performance in Introductory Computer Science Courses

Contextualized learning is considered beneficial for student success. In this article, we assess the impact of context-based learning tools on student grade performance in an introductory computer science course. In particular, we investigate two central questions: (1) does the use context-based learning tools, robots and animations, affect student performance? (2) How do age, gender, and ethnicity impact performance? To explore these questions, we compare the impact of educational robots in conjunction with animations against a second group of students who use only animations, while controlling for the effects of gender and ethnicity. We find that the addition of robots did not improve the students’ performance in our setting. Instead, our findings support the existing literature stating that gender and ethnicity are important predictors of student success. We also find that attendance is a strong predictor of student success

Toward Using Games to Teach Fundamental Computer Science Concepts

Video and computer games have become an important area of study in the field of education. Games have been designed to teach mathematics, physics, raise social awareness, teach history and geography, and train soldiers in the military. Recent work has created computer games for teaching computer programming and understanding basic algorithms. We present an investigation where computer games are used to teach two fundamental computer science concepts: boolean expressions and recursion. The games are intended to teach the concepts and not how to implement them in a programming language. For this investigation, two computer games were created. One is designed to teach basic boolean expressions and operators and the other to teach fundamental concepts of recursion. We describe the design and implementation of both games. We evaluate the effectiveness of these games using before and after surveys. The surveys were designed to ascertain basic understanding, attitudes and beliefs regarding the concepts. The boolean game was evaluated with local high school students and students in a college level introductory computer science course. The recursion game was evaluated with students in a college level introductory computer science course. We present the analysis of the collected survey information for both games. This analysis shows a significant positive change in student attitude towards recursion and modest gains in student learning outcomes for both topics

Computational Thinking in Education: Where does it fit? A systematic literary review

Computational Thinking (CT) has been described as an essential skill which everyone should learn and can therefore include in their skill set. Seymour Papert is credited as concretising Computational Thinking in 1980 but since Wing popularised the term in 2006 and brought it to the international community's attention, more and more research has been conducted on CT in education. The aim of this systematic literary review is to give educators and education researchers an overview of what work has been carried out in the domain, as well as potential gaps and opportunities that still exist. Overall it was found in this review that, although there is a lot of work currently being done around the world in many different educational contexts, the work relating to CT is still in its infancy. Along with the need to create an agreed-upon definition of CT lots of countries are still in the process of, or have not yet started, introducing CT into curriculums in all levels of education. It was also found that Computer Science/Computing, which could be the most obvious place to teach CT, has yet to become a mainstream subject in some countries, although this is improving. Of encouragement to educators is the wealth of tools and resources being developed to help teach CT as well as more and more work relating to curriculum development. For those teachers looking to incorporate CT into their schools or classes then there are bountiful options which include programming, hands-on exercises and more. The need for more detailed lesson plans and curriculum structure however, is something that could be of benefit to teachers

Using Sound to Represent Uncertainty in Spatial Data

There is a limit to the amount of spatial data that can be shown visually in an effective manner, particularly when the data sets are extensive or complex. Using sound to represent some of these data (sonification) is a way of avoiding visual overload. This thesis creates a conceptual model showing how sonification can be used to represent spatial data and evaluates a number of elements within the conceptual model. These are examined in three different case studies to assess the effectiveness of the sonifications. Current methods of using sonification to represent spatial data have been restricted by the technology available and have had very limited user testing. While existing research shows that sonification can be done, it does not show whether it is an effective and useful method of representing spatial data to the end user. A number of prototypes show how spatial data can be sonified, but only a small handful of these have performed any user testing beyond the authors’ immediate colleagues (where n > 4). This thesis creates and evaluates sonification prototypes, which represent uncertainty using three different case studies of spatial data. Each case study is evaluated by a significant user group (between 45 and 71 individuals) who completed a task based evaluation with the sonification tool, as well as reporting qualitatively their views on the effectiveness and usefulness of the sonification method. For all three case studies, using sound to reinforce information shown visually results in more effective performance from the majority of the participants than traditional visual methods. Participants who were familiar with the dataset were much more effective at using the sonification than those who were not and an interactive sonification which requires significant involvement from the user was much more effective than a static sonification, which did not provide significant user engagement. Using sounds with a clear and easily understood scale (such as piano notes) was important to achieve an effective sonification. These findings are used to improve the conceptual model developed earlier in this thesis and highlight areas for future research

Spartan Daily, May 1, 1996

Volume 106, Issue 61https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/8846/thumbnail.jp

Computer Science To Go (CS2Go): Developing a course to introduce and teach Computer Science and Computational Thinking to secondary school students

Computer Science To Go (CS2Go) is a course designed to teach Transition Year Students about Computer Science and Computational Thinking. This project has been conducted over two years and this thesis charts the development of the course from the initial research stage, through the lesson creation sections to the testing and evaluation of the course material. Over 80 hours of engaging, informative and challenging material has been developed for use in the classroom. Alongside the lesson plans, assessment and monitoring tools have been created, including a novel tool to assess students Computational Thinking skills. The content was tested in two major studies after an initial pilot study. This initial pilot study proved useful in constructing the full CS2Go course. Overall the course has been well received with teachers and students engaging well with the content. A web portal has also been created to allow for easy dissemination of all the CS2Go material. The further development of this web portal will turn CS2Go into a one-stop shop for teachers and educators hoping to find CS teaching material