An Interactive Serious Mobile Game for Supporting the Learning of Programming in JavaScript in the Context of Eco-Friendly City Management

Maskeliūnas, Rytis; Kulikajevas, Audrius; Blažauskas, Tomas; Damaševičius, Robertas; Swacha, Jakub

doi:10.3390/computers9040102

Cited by 31 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 60 publications

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“…The past success of traditional video-games has led the scientific community to adapt visual simulation, virtual reality and games to other contexts of application, such as health, education, law, and so on [19][20][21][22]. One approach currently on the rise is gamification [7], as a part of the Engineering curricula for education.…”

Section: Gamification In Educationmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Cloud Game-Based Educative Platform Architecture: The CyberScratch Project

et al. 2021

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The employment of modern technologies is widespread in our society, so the inclusion of practical activities for education has become essential and useful at the same time. These activities are more noticeable in Engineering, in areas such as cybersecurity, data science, artificial intelligence, etc. Additionally, these activities acquire even more relevance with a distance education methodology, as our case is. The inclusion of these practical activities has clear advantages, such as (1) promoting critical thinking and (2) improving students’ abilities and skills for their professional careers. There are several options, such as the use of remote and virtual laboratories, virtual reality and game-based platforms, among others. This work addresses the development of a new cloud game-based educational platform, which defines a modular and flexible architecture (using light containers). This architecture provides interactive and monitoring services and data storage in a transparent way. The platform uses gamification to integrate the game as part of the instructional process. The CyberScratch project is a particular implementation of this architecture focused on cybersecurity game-based activities. The data privacy management is a critical issue for these kinds of platforms, so the architecture is designed with this feature integrated in the platform components. To achieve this goal, we first focus on all the privacy aspects for the data generated by our cloud game-based platform, by considering the European legal context for data privacy following GDPR and ISO/IEC TR 20748-1:2016 recommendations for Learning Analytics (LA). Our second objective is to provide implementation guidelines for efficient data privacy management for our cloud game-based educative platform. All these contributions are not found in current related works. The CyberScratch project, which was approved by UNED for the year 2020, considers using the xAPI standard for data handling and services for the game editor, game engine and game monitor modules of CyberScratch. Therefore, apart from considering GDPR privacy and LA recommendations, our cloud game-based architecture covers all phases from game creation to the final users’ interactions with the game.

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Section: Gamification In Educationmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Cloud Game-Based Educative Platform Architecture: The CyberScratch Project

et al. 2021

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“…While the reader interested in the detailed description of how the respective problems are presented in the game is referred to the already mentioned paper presenting the application from the technical point of view [31], for a glimpse of how the game looks like, Figure 1 presents a screenshot of an iterative search challenge visualization. To solve it, the student's program has to find the right waste deposit place depending on the randomly assigned type of waste truck.…”

Section: Game Formmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In our recent paper [31], we presented the technical internals of the game app and discussed its aspects that are most relevant to computer science education-the coverage of problems to solve and how they were put into the frame of a game, as well as the measured effectiveness of the game in teaching the introductory concepts and the construct of programming logic and thinking. In this paper, we focus on the sustainable development topics featured in the game.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introducing Sustainable Development Topics into Computer Science Education: Design and Evaluation of the Eco JSity Game

et al. 2021

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With increasing awareness of the advantages of game-based learning, there is a growing number of studies showing its application to both computer science education and sustainable development education. In this paper, we describe, with the example of the Eco JSity application, how both of these areas can be combined into a single tool. The presented evaluation results showed that despite incorporating the sustainable development topics into both the theme and mechanics of the educational game, both the usefulness and ease-of-use of the application were still assessed positively by students. We also identified three clusters of students depending on their attitude towards combining education on computer science and sustainable development. We concluded that game-based learning provided a capable means of incorporating sustainable development topics into teaching of unrelated technical skills.

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“…Our e-learning application above is a type of serious game, where the goal is to improve the learning experience [32]. Many other serious games were suggested in education [33]. The main difference between previous e-learning games and ours is in focusing on guiding students towards skills they need to practice, while maintaining the the freedom to choose their activities.…”

Section: Elements Of Gamificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Supervisor-Worker Problems with an Application in Education

Shmaryahu

Gal

Shani

2021

Sensors

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In many e-learning settings, allowing students to choose which skills to practice encourages their motivation and contributes to learning. However, when given choice, students may prefer to practice skills that they already master, rather than practice skills they need to master. On the other hand, requiring students only to practice their required skills may reduce their motivation and lead to dropout. In this paper, we model this tradeoff as a multi-agent planning task, which we call SWOPP (Supervisor- Worker Problem with Partially Overlapping goals), involving two agents—a supervisor (teacher) and a worker (student)—each with different, yet non-conflicting, goals. The supervisor and worker share joint goals (mastering skills). The worker plans to achieve his/her own goals (completing an e-learning session) at a minimal cost (effort required to solve problems). The supervisor guides the worker towards achieving the joint goals by controlling the problems in the choice set for the worker. We provide a formal model for the SWOPP task and two sound and complete algorithms for the supervisor to guide the worker’s plan to achieve their joint goals. We deploy SWOPP for the first time in a real-world study to personalize math questions for K5 students using an e-learning software in schools. We show that SWOPP was able to guide students’ interactions with the software to practice necessary skills without deterring their motivation.

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An Interactive Serious Mobile Game for Supporting the Learning of Programming in JavaScript in the Context of Eco-Friendly City Management

Cited by 31 publications

References 60 publications

A Cloud Game-Based Educative Platform Architecture: The CyberScratch Project

A Cloud Game-Based Educative Platform Architecture: The CyberScratch Project

Introducing Sustainable Development Topics into Computer Science Education: Design and Evaluation of the Eco JSity Game

Supervisor-Worker Problems with an Application in Education

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