Investigating Learners’ Behaviours When Interacting with a Programming Microworld

Abstract

In our attempt to support Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) learning for beginners, we designed a novel microworld called PrOgO. It is based on a three-dimensional (3D) constructive game metaphor for describing OOP basic concepts and their implementation. In this paper, we describe a study about the use of PrOgO by beginners to investigate their behaviours when interacting with the programming microworld. The study is based on the collection, analysis and reporting of data about players (playing analytics). The data analysis allows the identification and the characterisation of different behaviours. From an educational perspective, the expected behaviour has been confirmed for a limited number of students. This enabled us to conclude that the design of the game needs to be improved. In addition, behaviours triggered by most students might have other educational values, which could be confirmed by other similar studies.

Game design and didactic transposition of knowledge. The case of progo, a game dedicated to learning object-oriented programming

“…This analysis aims to evaluate the distance between the target situation (the knowledge to be taught) and the source situation (the game situation induced by Progo). Although several empirical studies have been conducted to analyse the use of Progo and its learning effectiveness (Djelil et al, 2015;Djelil et al, 2017;Djelil et al, 2019), we do not focus in this study on the analysis of the learning experience, but we rather aim to analyse the game design based on the didactic transposition model.…”