Learning to communicate computationally with Flip: a bi-modal programming language for game creation

Teaching basic computational concepts and skills to school children is currently a curricular focus in many countries. Running parallel to this trend are advances in programming environments and teaching methods which aim to make computer science more accessible, and more motivating. In this paper, we describe the design and evaluation of Flip, a programming language that aims to help 11–15 year olds develop computational skills through creating their own 3D role-playing games. Flip has two main components: 1) a visual language (based on an interlocking blocks design common to many current visual languages), and 2) a dynamically updating natural language version of the script under creation. This programming-language/natural-language pairing is a unique feature of Flip, designed to allow learners to draw upon their familiarity with natural language to “decode the code”. Flip aims to support young people in developing an understanding of computational concepts as well as the skills to use and communicate these concepts effectively. This paper investigates the extent to which Flip can be used by young people to create working scripts, and examines improvements in their expression of computational rules and concepts after using the tool. We provide an overview of the design and implementation of Flip before describing an evaluation study carried out with 12–13 year olds in a naturalistic setting. Over the course of 8 weeks, the majority of students were able to use Flip to write small programs to bring about interactive behaviours in the games they created. Furthermore, there was a significant improvement in their computational communication after using Flip (as measured by a pre/post-test). An additional finding was that girls wrote more, and more complex, scripts than did boys, and there was a trend for girls to show greater learning gains relative to the boys

Using gaming paratexts in the literacy classroom

This paper illustrates how digital game paratexts may effectively be used in the high school English to meet a variety of traditional and multimodal literacy outcomes. Paratexts are texts that refer to digital gaming and game cultures, and using them in the classroom enables practitioners to focus on and valorise the considerable literacies and skills that young people develop and deploy in their engagement with digital gaming and game cultures. The effectiveness of valorizing paratexts in this manner is demonstrated through two examples of assessment by students in classes where teachers had designed curriculum and assessment activities using paratexts

Accelerating K-12 computational thinking using scaffolding, staging, and abstraction

We describe a three-stage model of computing instruction beginning with a simple, highly scaffolded programming en-vironment (Kodu) and progressing to more challenging frame-works (Alice and Lego NXT-G). In moving between frame-works, students explore the similarities and differences in how concepts such as variables, conditionals, and looping are realized. This can potentially lead to a deeper under-standing of programming, bringing students closer to true computational thinking. Some novel strategies for teach-ing with Kodu are outlined. Finally, we briefly report on our methodology and select preliminary results from a pi-lot study using this curriculum with students ages 10–17, including several with disabilities

Understanding learning within a commercial video game: A case study

There has been an increasing interest in the debate on the value and relevance using video games for learning. Some of the interest stems from frustration with current educational methods. However, some of this interest also stems from the observations of large numbers of children that play video games. This paper finds that children can learn basic construction skills from playing a video game called World of Goo. The study also employed novel eye-tracking technology to measure endogenous eye blinks and eye gaze fixations. Measures of both these indicators of cognitive processing further suggested that children in the study learned to play the two video games, World of Goo and Bad Piggies. Overall, the results of the study provide further support of the potential for children to learn by playing commercial video games

'I liked it, but it made you think too much': A case study of computer game authoring in the Key Stage 3 ICT curriculum

The importance of giving pupils opportunities to become producers of digital media is well documented in the literature (see Harel, 1991; Papert, 1993; Kafai, 1995; Harel Caperton, 2010; Luckin et al., 2012; Nesta, 2012; Sefton-Green, 2013), however there has been little research in this area in the context of the UK Key Stage 3 ICT curriculum. The purpose of this study is to achieve an understanding of how authoring computer games in a mainstream secondary setting can support the learning of basic game design and programming concepts. The research explores pupils’ experiences of the process they followed and the areas of learning they encountered as they made their games, and considers what they valued and what they found difficult in the game authoring activity. The research draws on the learning theory of constructionism, which asserts the importance of pupils using computers as ‘building material’ to create digital artefacts. In the process of creating these artefacts, over time, computers become ‘objects to think with’, enabling pupils to learn how to learn (Papert, 1980b; Harel and Papert, 1991a). Data were collected in planning documents, journals and the games pupils made, in recordings of their working conversations, and in pair and group interviews. Findings indicate that as well as learning some basic programming concepts, pupils enjoyed the activity, demonstrated positive attitudes to learning and felt a sense of achievement in creating a complex artefact which had personal and cultural significance for them. This research acknowledges the need to develop accessible units of work to implement aspects of the new Computing curriculum (DfE, 2013c), especially for teachers and pupils who have little prior knowledge of the field. It suggests that computer game authoring may offer a viable entry and considers the extent to which constructionist approaches are suitable for this kind of work

An Analysis of Pre-service Teachers' Learning Process in Programming Learning

As the importance of computing technology increases, computer science education is being actively implemented around the world. Because computer science education is being introduced into the curriculum, research on how to effectively teach programming (which is the core of automation) is actively underway. Although the importance of block-based programming languages has increased, most studies have focused on text-based programming languages. As interest in programming increases, block-based programming languages will be taught to a variety of audiences. Therefore, this study analyzed Code.org, which provides a development environment for block-based programming; this study then investigated the programming learning process of pre-service teachers, who used Code.org. Sixteen pre-service teachers participated in the study, and their learning processes were uncovered by analyzing their programming results. This suggests that pre-service teachers can learn sequential and necessary repetition without difficulty. However, the pre-service teachers failed to use the repetition block through abstraction. Besides, for While and Until, pre-service teachers did not understand the concept of repeating according to the condition. For Counter, pre-service teachers had difficulty repeating the use of variables. In the condition, pre-service teachers were not able to separate the command, which should be executed when the condition is True and when it is False. For Event, pre-service teachers had no problem utilizing the function, but they were not able to call the function with a parameter. Based on this, it was confirmed that a pre-service teacher can understand the principle of programming development in advance by understanding the abstraction, condition, and variable in the loop statement. In this study, there was a limit to practicing block-based programming language due to the platform’s low scalability. Future research should solve these problems and diversify the research subjects