Guidelines for Designing and Teaching an Effective Object-Oriented Design and Programming Course

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“AR The Gods of Olympus”: Design and Pilot Evaluation of an Augmented Reality Educational Game for Greek Mythology

Teaching and learning theoretical subjects, such as History, although important, is considered by many students to be non-appealing. Alternative teaching approaches include the use of educational games and augmented reality (AR) applications, or more recently, AR educational games. Such games are considered to increase students’ interest for the subject and lead to better learning outcomes. However, studies about the use of AR educational games in the classroom are sparse and further research is necessary. In this article, we present an AR-enhanced educational game for teaching History (Greek Mythology) to 3rd grade Primary school students in Greece. The game, called “AR The Gods of Olympus” consists of three mini games: an AR game with the gods/goddesses of Olympus using narration; a memory game with cards depicting the gods and their symbols; and a quiz game. In order to study the effectiveness of the game and students’ experience and perceptions on it, a study was carried out with primary school students that used the game in classroom. The study utilized a pre-/post-test design, a brief questionnaire based on the MEEGA+ model for evaluating educational games, and observation of students during game playing. Students’ performance was improved after playing the game but the difference was not statistically significant, while the game was positively perceived by students. Especially the AR mini game raised students’ interest and as the students themselves stated helped them “learn while playing”

Overview and Comparative Analysis of Game Engines for Desktop and Mobile Devices

Game engines are tools that expedite the highly demanding process of developing games. Nowadays, the great interest of people from various fields on serious games has made even more demanding the usage of game engines, since people with limited coding skills are also involved in developing serious games. Literature in the field has studied game engines focusing on specific needs, such as 3D mobile game engines or open source 3D game engines. The motivation of this article and at the same time the advancement brought by it in the field, lies in the extension of an existing framework for the comparative analysis of several game engines that export games at least on Android and iOS mobile devices and cover a wide range of different user profiles and needs. In order to validate the results of this comparative analysis a shooter game was developed for Android devices based on official tutorials of the two game engines that came out to be more powerful, namely Unity and Unreal Engine 4. In conclusion, there is not a single game engine that is better for every purpose and the extensive overview provided can help users choose the most suitable game engine for their needs

Designing and deploying programming courses: Strategies, tools, difficulties and pedagogy

30 Halama

Teachers’ Perspectives on Learning and Programming Environments for Secondary Education

Part 2: Programming and Computer Science EducationInternational audienceTeaching and learning programming is a challenge. Although several learning and programming environments have been proposed for classes, there seems to be more dissent than consensus as to which tools are preferable over others. This paper investigates teachers’ perspectives on popular learning and programming environments used in secondary computer science education in Germany. The environments investigated are: BlueJ, Scratch, Greenfoot, Eclipse, MIT App Inventor, Processing IDE, and Alice. Based on prior research, a catalogue of environment features supporting the learning processes of students was constructed. Using these criteria, an online-survey was conducted with computer science teachers in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. In the survey, the participating teachers evaluated the selected tools’ adequacy for teaching object-oriented programming. The findings support the results of prior research conducted with students, stressing the importance of a simple and user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) as well as the option to visualise classes and objects. Contrary to prior studies, the results show that teachers do not see the editor as equally important, as students do, and that there is no consensus about the role of the area of application for choosing an integrated development environment (IDE). Student-friendly debugging messages as well as a step-by-step execution of programs were identified as important features. Although no tool excelled for every criterion, the clear favourite was BlueJ

Educational technolgy: a didactic microworld for an introduction to object-oriented programming

Teaching and learning programming is without doubt difficult. This fact resulted in extended research on the area of Didactics of Informatics and specifically on the area of teaching and learning programming, as well as on the area of Educational Technology and its role in teaching and learning programming. Although many aspects of novice programming have been investigated, the strengths and weaknesses of the various programming paradigms in the context of an introductory programming course have not been studied. Despite this fact, the majority of the educational institutions used, until the very few last years, the imperative programming paradigm. Furthermore, the research that was carried out and the educational tools that were developed refer, mainly, to the imperative programming paradigm. However, papers presented at international conferences about the content of introductory programming courses, the Computer Science Curriculum and the software market dictate the transition to the object-oriented programming paradigm, or at least the need to teach the object-oriented programming paradigm.No matter what programming paradigm is used the main concepts of programming are the same and teaching them poses many difficulties. One of the most important factors that makes programming difficult to learn is the fact that students are taught the principles of programming by the classic approach, which is based on a general purpose programming language, a professional programming environment for the chosen language and a set of problems from the area of number and symbol processing. So teaching object-oriented programming with a professional programming environment and a general purpose programming language, such as C++ and Java, will not have the desired effects. What is needed is a new integrated programming environment for the introduction to object-oriented programming.The conclusions mentioned above motivated this dissertation, which aims at developing an integrated programming environment for an introduction to object-oriented programming that fulfils students’ didactic needs. For the achievement of this goal we considered necessary to review the various approaches to teaching programming that have been proposed and the educational tools that have been developed on their context and the principles for designing novice programming environments. The design of the new educational programming environment was based on the reviewed research and the combination of the various forms of Educational Technology and it:1. Intends to introduce students to the basic concepts of object-oriented programming and control structures and also to prepare them for an easier transition to a general purpose programming language, such as C++ and Java.2. Incorporates a series of lessons for the introduction to object-oriented programming.3. Incorporates the ability to record students’ difficulties during their introduction to object-oriented programming, since the research that has been carried out until now has revealed important facts about teaching programming but very few about object-oriented programming.Another goal of this dissertation was to use and evaluate the programming environment and the series of lessons incorporated in it, in order to: 1. Investigate the support provided to the student by the programming environment and in particular the support provided by the various forms of educational technology that are incorporated in it.2. Use the ability to record students’ actions for the investigation of students’ difficulties, errors and misconceptions.The dissertation consists of 2 parts that are separated in 13 chapters. In the first part that consists of 9 chapters we present the results of the extended research that has been carried out the last decades about novice programmers and in the second part that consists of 4 chapters we describe the programming environment we developed.In the 1st Chapter we review the difficulties, errors and misconceptions of students during their introduction to programming. In chapters 2 to 8 we present a taxonomy of the various approaches to teaching programming and the educational tools that have been developed in the context of each approach. In the 2nd Chapter we present the classic approach to teaching programming and the main didactic problems associated with it and we give a brief description of the alternative teaching approaches. In the 3rd Chapter we describe in detail the microworld – mini-language approach to teaching programming and in the 4th Chapter the teaching approach that is based on improving the diagnostic abilities of compilers. In the 5th Chapter we present structure editors and iconic programming languages. In the 6th Chapter we describe software visualization concepts and program animators. In the 7th Chapter we refer to the use of algorithm animation techniques and in the 8th Chapter to program auralisation. In the 9th Chapter we review the most important design principles of integrated programming environments for novices.In the 10th Chapter we present the didactic and research rationale that guides the design of the programming environment and we analyze the pedagogical value of its features. In the 11th Chapter we describe the architecture of the software that we developed. In the 12th Chapter we present in detail the design and the results of the pilot use and evaluation of the programming environment. In the 13th Chapter we review the conclusions of this dissertation and we make proposals for improving the programming environment and using it for further research on teaching and learning object-oriented programming.Finally, we present the bibliography and in the appendix the source code of the software that we developed

The Use of Educational Games in Programming Assignments: SQL Island as a Case Study

Educational games have attracted the interest of instructors and researchers in various fields of knowledge since they seem to motivate students, engage them in the educational process, and improve their performance. Computer programming is, without a doubt, cognitively demanding, and this has resulted in extended utilization of educational games. An important limitation of the relevant research lies in the fact that it is based on volunteer participants, while it is carried out as a side activity in programming courses and not in real-world course settings. In this article, a study investigating the utilization of the educational game SQL Island in the context of an assignment on the Structured Query Language (SQL) in a compulsory undergraduate course on Web programming is presented. Fifty-six students attending the course evaluated the player experience and perceived short-term learning through a questionnaire based on the MEEGA+ model for evaluating educational games targeted to computing education. The results both on player experience and perceived short-term learning were rather positive. Students’ performance in the programming tasks of the game was very good, and the overall intervention proved to be effective. Moreover, conclusions were drawn on the constituent features of educational games that can be effectively used in the context of programming assignments

Investigating the Support Provided by Chatbots to Educational Institutions and Their Students: A Systematic Literature Review

A chatbot, or else a conversational agent (CA), is a technology that is used in order to imitate the process of a conversation between a human being and a software application for supporting specific services. The utilization of this technology has been increasing considerably over the past five years, particularly in education where CAs are mostly utilized as teaching assistants that provide educational content. This paper aims to contribute to the existing body of knowledge by systematically reviewing the support provided by chatbots both to educational institutions and their students, investigating their capabilities in further detail, and highlighting the various ways that this technology could and should be used in order to maximize its benefits. Emphasis is given to analyzing and synthesizing the emerging roles of CAs, usage recommendations and suggestions, student’s desires, and challenges recorded in the literature. For this reason, a systematic literature review (SLR) was carried out using the PRISMA framework in order to minimize the common biases and limitations of SLRs. However, we must note that the SLR presented has specific limitations, namely using only Scopus as a search engine, utilizing a general search query, and selecting only journal articles published in English in the last five years