CTArcade: Computational thinking with games in school age children

Abstract

We believe that children as young as ten can directly benefit from opportunities to engage in computational thinking. One approach to provide these opportunities is to focus on social game play. Understanding game play is common across a range of media and ages. Children can begin by solving puzzles on paper, continue on game boards, and ultimately complete their solutions on computers. Through this process, learners can be guided through increasingly complex algorithmic thinking activities that are built from their tacit knowledge and excitement about game play. This paper describes our approach to teaching computational thinking skills without traditional programming -but instead by building on children's existing game playing interest and skills. We built a system called CTArcade, with an initial game (TicTac-Toe), which we evaluated with 18 children aged 10-15. The study shows that our particular approach helped young children to better draw out and articulate algorithmic thinking patterns, which were tacitly present when they played naturally on paper, but not explicitly apparent to them until they used the CTArcade interface.

Fostering computational thinking through collaborative game-based learning

“…This approach encompasses a variety of serious games specifically developed to teach computer programming and foster CT skills. It might represent a valid alternative to learning through designing games, since, as highlighted in [33], building a game from scratch could be too challenging for novice programmers and thus frustrating for the majority of players.…”

“…CTArcade [33] is another serious game where players have to design a set of rules that are executed by a character while playing Tic-Tac-Toe. Making this game rules explicit is considered an important process for improving CT skills; in fact, people often apply them in a natural, perhaps unconscious way and normally there is neither the chance nor the reason to transform this knowledge into abstract instructions.…”

“…Therefore, CT skills should become an important piece of the end-users' background, like reading, writing and calculating. In line with this consideration, several initiatives all over the world are aimed at ensuring that students develop CT skills at K-12 level [33,59,67].…”

Programming: A Study on Upper Primary Students’ Attitude towards Education Digital Games

“…Further information related to digital games was reported through observation in Table III. The followings are some examples of games that are used in past studies to teach programming. Lee et al [9] experimented with the use of online logic game, Tic Tac Toe, produced by CTArcade. When the students see the visual patent and strategies of games, they learn the concepts of problem solving and formal logic.…”

“…The ICTL module can be improved by embedding the elements in programming. Based on this study and the suggestions that fundamental programming should be taught as early as possible ( [9], [12]), all the activities that have been done so far have only used the basic concept of programming or are inclined more towards logical thinking.…”