Towards a Lightweight Approach for Modding Serious Educational Games: Assisting Novice Designers

Serious educational games (SEGs) are a growing segment of the education community’s pedagogical toolbox. Effectively creating such games remains challenging, as teachers and industry trainers are content experts; typically they are not game designers with the theoretical knowledge and practical experience needed to create a quality SEG. Here, a lightweight approach to interactively explore and modify existing SEGs is introduced, a toll that can be broadly adopted by educators for pedagogically sound SEGs. Novice game designers can rapidly explore the educational and traditional elements of a game, with a stress on tracking the SEG learning objectives, as well as allowing for reviewing and altering a variety of graphic and audio game elements

Frame-Based Editing: Easing the Transition from Blocks to Text-Based Programming

Block-based programming systems, such as Scratch or Alice, are the most popular environments for introducing young children to programming. However, mastery of text-based programming continues to be the educational goal for stu- dents who continue to program into their teenage years and beyond. Transitioning across the significant gap between the two editing styles presents a difficult challenge in school- level teaching of programming. We propose a new style of program manipulation to bridge the gap: frame-based edit- ing. Frame-based editing has the resistance to errors and approachability of block-based programming while retaining the flexibility and more conventional programming seman- tics of text-based programming languages. In this paper, we analyse the issues involved in the transition from blocks to text and argue that they can be overcome by using frame- based editing as an intermediate step. A design and imple- mentation of a frame-based editor is provided

TextCode: A Tool to Support Problem Solving Among Novice Programmers

Several tools have been developed to support novices learning to program. Most of them focus on the code and provide features regarding the visualization of the data structures or the debugging. However, in introductory programming courses, students are typically given exercises in the form of a problem written in natural language; and the first challenge they face is understanding the problem, identifying the relevant information, and then translating that information into code. To our knowledge, little attention has been paid to proposing tools targeted at supporting this problem-solving step, even though it is crucial for deriving a correct solution. In this paper, we present an IDE to encourage novices to understand the problem before start coding, decompose it down into subproblems, explore alternative implementations for each subproblem, and arrange these implementations to build a general solution. Finally, the adopted problem-solving approach is discussed

On the Quality of Crowdsourced Programming Assignments

Crowdsourcing has been used in computer science education to alleviate the teachers’ workload in creating course content, and as a learning and revision method for students through its use in educational systems. Tools that utilize crowdsourcing can act as a great way for students to further familiarize themselves with the course concepts, all while creating new content for their peers and future course iterations. In this study, student-created programming assignments from the second week of an introductory Java programming course are examined alongside the peer reviews these assignments received. The quality of the assignments and the peer reviews is inspected, for example, through comparing the peer reviews with expert reviews using inter-rater reliability. The purpose of this study is to inspect what kinds of programming assignments novice students create, and whether the same novice students can act as reliable reviewers. While it is not possible to draw definite conclusions from the results of this study due to limitations concerning the usability of the tool, the results seem to indicate that novice students are able to recognise differences in programming assignment quality, especially with sufficient guidance and well thought-out instructions

A Project Component in a Web Engineering Course

Web applications are an extremely important and ubiquitous part of today\u27s world. Students must not only know how to develop them from a technical perspective, but in doing so need to understand how to follow the proper principles of software engineering - delivering the project on time, on budget, and in a high quality manner. At the Department of Software Engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology, we offer a Web Engineering course which not only introduces students to a variety of web technologies, but more importantly it shows them how to use them in a collaborative environment while properly utilizing web engineering methodologies.The course includes a significant project component requiring students to use a variety of contemporary technologies and resources to create a robust web application. The main premise of the project is for each group to create a web portal using both custom-built and already existing components. The project takes place over the entire 15 week course term, includes multiple releases, and has students work in teams of 4-5. This innovative project component has received significant praise from both students and faculty members while fulfilling an emerging area of our curriculum. Students enjoy the real-world nature of the project and the ability to work with contemporary technologies in a format which closely mimics what they will see in industry. This paper outlines the educational objectives, project details, some sample project results of our class offering, as well as student feedback about the project. The goal of this work is to share the project, its importance, and lessons learned for use at other institutions with similar educational goals

"It's Weird That it Knows What I Want": Usability and Interactions with Copilot for Novice Programmers

Recent developments in deep learning have resulted in code-generation models that produce source code from natural language and code-based prompts with high accuracy. This is likely to have profound effects in the classroom, where novices learning to code can now use free tools to automatically suggest solutions to programming exercises and assignments. However, little is currently known about how novices interact with these tools in practice. We present the first study that observes students at the introductory level using one such code auto-generating tool, Github Copilot, on a typical introductory programming (CS1) assignment. Through observations and interviews we explore student perceptions of the benefits and pitfalls of this technology for learning, present new observed interaction patterns, and discuss cognitive and metacognitive difficulties faced by students. We consider design implications of these findings, specifically in terms of how tools like Copilot can better support and scaffold the novice programming experience.Comment: 26 pages, 2 figures, TOCH

A Computer Learning Environment for Novice Java Programmers That Supports Cognitive Load Reducing Adaptations and Dynamic Visualizations of Computer Memory

Learning to program a computer is difficult for many. The Learning Edge Momentum hypothesis suggests that the difficulty may be due to the tightly integrated nature of programming concepts and adapting the way curriculum is offered may have a significant influence on the outcomes. We investigate applying cognitive load reducing methods to instruction of the introductory programming concepts of declaration, assignment and sequence, using a new learning environment that an instructor can adapt for a specific example or that a student can personalize for amount and modality of content provided. Our study has three learning surveys. Each learning survey has short instructional videos designed using cognitive load reducing methods and then asks participants to solve novel problems using the presented materials. Our first learning survey was completed by 123 participants recruited on Amazon\u27s Mechanical Turk (AMT). We found that 23% that watched the instructional video without computer memory (n=61) answered the three code tracing questions correctly. Our second learning survey included instructional videos prepared after analyzing the results of the previous survey and emphasized cognitive load reducing methods in preparing the new instruction. This second survey was completed by 220 participants also recruited via AMT. We found that 57% of the participants that watched the instructional video without computer memory (n=72) answered the three tracing questions correctly. Our third learning survey with 322 participants recruited via AMT confirmed that the difference between the two videos was statistically significant with medium effect size. In the third survey, 29% of the participants watching the first survey instructional video without computer memory and 45% of those that watched the second survey instructional video without computer memory answered all three tracing questions correctly. In the third learning survey, the gain from 29% from our first short video that we thought was a reasonable presentation to 45% in the second short video seems to lend strong support to the hypothesis that our typical methods of instruction for introductory programming simply overwhelm the cognitive capabilities of many of the students. Our results suggest that cognitive load reducing methods may be very helpful for teaching introductory programming concepts

The Cost of Syntax and How To Avoid It: Text versus Frame-Based Editing

Plain text has always been the predominant medium for writing and editing programs for expert users. Text is powerful and flexible, but requires more careful manipulation than structural editors, such as those found in block-based environments. In addition, in textual editors programmers are responsible for managing detailed orthography and layout – when beginners work with text, significant time is spent managing syntax problems, indentation and spacing. Frame-based editing is a new editing paradigm that combines the structural editing of block-based systems with the flexibility and keyboard-focus of text editing. In this paper, we empirically examine how much time and effort is spent by beginners on managing syntax errors and indentation, which can be automatically saved by switching to frame-based editing. The data is obtained using the Blackbox dataset; the results predict a clear advantage of frame-based editing over traditional text editors

An Embedding Technique for Language-Independent Lecturer-Oriented Program Visualization

Nowadays, programming is a promising skill to be learned; the demand of programmer is increased. To align with such trend, several Program Visualization (PV) tools have been developed. Using such tool, user can learn how a particular program works through interactive and descriptive visualization. However, most of the tools are language-dependent: they use either language-dependent debugger or code to generate visualization. Such dependency may become a problem when a program written in new programming language is incorporated. Therefore, this paper proposes an embedding technique to handle given issue. To incorporate new programming language, it only needs five language-dependent features to be set. In general, our proposed technique works in threefold: embedding some statements to target program, generating visualization states by running the program with console commands, and visualizing given program based on generated visualization states. According to our evaluation, proposed technique is able to incorporate program written in any programming languages as long as those languages provide required language-dependent features. Further, it is practical to be used since it still have the benefits of conventional PV even though it is designed as a language-independent PV

Towards a Serious Game to Help Students Learn Computer Programming

International audienceVideo games are part of our culture like TV, movies, and books. We believe that this kind of software can be used to increase students' interest in computer science. Video games with other goals than entertainment, serious games, are present, today, in several fields such as education, government, health, defence, industry, civil security, and science. This paper presents a study around a serious game dedicated to strengthening programming skills. Real-Time Strategy, which is a popular game genre, seems to be the most suitable kind of game to support such a serious game. From programming teaching features to video game characteristics, we define a teaching organisation to experiment if a serious game can be adapted to learn programming