This was actually fun! : Engaging users in conversations about digital literacy

This interactive presentation highlights pop-up programming designed to improve 21st century digital literacies. The session includes an overview of activity development and reflections on its success. Participants will explore light-touch digital literacy games on their personal devices and take home tools to recreate similar programming at their library

Adding traceability to an educational IDE : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Master degree in Computer Science at Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand

High dropout and failure rate in introductory programming courses indicate the need to improve programming comprehension of novice learners. Some of educational tools have successfully used game environments to motivate students. Our approach is based on a novel type of notional machine which can facilitate programming comprehension in the context of turn-based games. The first aim of this project is to design a layered notional machine that is reversible. This type of notional machine provides bi-directional traceability and supports multiple layers of abstraction. The second aim of this project is to explore the feasibility and in particular to evaluate the performance of using the traceability in a web-based environment. To achieve these aims, we implement this type of notional machine through instrumentation and investigate the capture of the entire execution state of a program. However, capturing the entire execution state produces a large amount of tracing data that raises scalability issues. Therefore, several encoding and compression methods are proposed to minimise the server work-load. A proof-of-concept implementation which based on the SoGaCo educational web IDE is presented. The evaluation of the educational benefits and end user studies are outside the scope of this thesis

Repeated Games with Present-Biased Preferences

We study infinitely repeated games with observable actions, where players have present-biased (so-called beta-delta) preferences. We give a two-step procedure to characterize Strotz-Pollak equilibrium payoffs: compute the continuation payoff set using recursive techniques, and then use this set to characterize the equilibrium payoff set U(beta,delta). While Strotz-Pollak equilibrium and subgame perfection differ here, the generated paths and payoffs nonetheless coincide. We then explore the cost of the present-time bias. Fixing the total present value of 1 util flow, lower beta or higher delta shrinks the payoff set. Surprisingly, unless the minimax outcome is a Nash equilibrium of the stage game, the equilibrium payoff set U(beta,delta) is not separately monotonic in beta or delta. While U(beta,delta) is contained in payoff set of a standard repeated game with smaller discount factor, the present-time bias precludes any lower bound on U(beta,delta) that would easily generalize the beta=1 folk-theorem.beta-delta preferences, repeated games, dynamic programming, Strotz-Pollak equilibrium

Using Simulations as a Starting Point for Constructing Meaningful Learning Games

For many school administrators and decision makers, the term “video games” holds numerous cultural associations which make their adoption in the education space challenging. Additionally, the term is so broad that it can sometimes be difficult to communicate explicitly a desire to build learning experiences that go beyond the Drill and Kill edutainment titles that currently dominate most people’s perceptions of educational games. By contrast, the term “simulations” is often well respected among educators, particularly in the natural sciences. With “simulation” already being a full genre of video games, it would seem natural that researchers are beginning to explore the overlaps between simulation games and pedagogical goals that go beyond those found in Drill and Kill games. In this chapter, we survey some of the relevant research concerning both simulations and video games and outline practical pathways through which we can leverage the interest and frameworks designed for simulation construction to facilitate the introduction of video game concepts and experiences into the classroom environment. In particular, we report on the use of Starlogo TNG, a graphical programming environment in which kids themselves can create simulation-based video games, for deepening children’s understanding of scientific concepts

Using an interactive whiteboard and a computer-programming tool to support the development of the key competencies in the New Zealand curriculum

Does children’s use of the software Scratch provide potential for the enhancement of key competencies as they work in pairs at the interactive whiteboard (IWB)? This article looks at how children using Scratch collaborated and managed their projects as they set about designing, constructing, testing and evaluating a game for others to play, a task that provided a sustained challenge over six weeks and beyond. The findings showed that the key competencies of participating, contributing, and relating to others were enhanced by the collaborative use of Scratch at the IWB, and that creative and conceptual thinking processes were sustained. Children became increasingly adept at using Scratch, and some children, previously thought to have poor social skills, began to articulate their understandings to others. While a guiding and scaffolding role was evident in teachers’ actions, close monitoring of group progress and direct input from teachers is required to keep the challenge high but achievable, and to extend children’s knowledge and thinking as they use Scratch at the IWB

A sweetspot for innovation:developing games with purpose through student-staff collaboration

Within industry as well as academia, developing games that have wider impact on society has been of particular interest in the last decade. The increasing use of terms such as ‘games with purpose’, ‘serious games’ and gamification’ has been mirrored in a flurry of activity in games research. Broader applications of games beyond entertainment are now well-understood and accepted, with universities and companies excelling in creating games to serve particular needs. However, it is not explicitly clear how undergraduates of game design and development courses can be directly involved in serious game creation. With most undergraduates inspired by commercial games development, and the games industry requiring that universities teach specific technical skills in their courses, balancing the research aspirations of academics with the educational requirements of an appropriate undergraduate course can be a difficult balancing act. In this paper, the authors present three case studies of games with purpose developed through collaboration between undergraduate students and academic staff. In all cases, the educational value of the projects for the students is considered in relation to the research value for the academics, who face increasing demands to develop research outcomes despite a necessity to provide a first-rate learning experience and nurture future game developers