K-12 game programming course concept using textual programming

Abstract

Several programming environments have been constructed to facilitate novice programming at K-12 and CS0/CS1 levels. The environments can be roughly divided into those using visual or textual programming. This paper presents a K-12 game programming course concept based on textual programming. The concept is based on an easy-to-use C# library, called Jypeli, built on top of Microsoft XNA Framework. The library tries to maintain advantages of visual programming and avoid challenges of textual programming. In particular, the library helps beginners to program their first games in a short period of time and without a heavy syntactic load. The course concept and an initial evaluation consisting of student feedback and a literature rationale are presented.

Instructional Media and Teaching Methods for Engaging Children with Computer Programming

“…Educators could take advantage of devices like tablets and smart phones for motivating in computer science topics [22]. Finally, some researchers additionally use unplugged computer science activities [7] or even textual programming languages [12]. Therefore, it would be interesting to study and evaluate which characteristics of programming environments and how can motivate young students and also make learning effective.…”

High school students' perspective to university CS1

“…The literature describes several K-12 outreach events in which middle and high school aged students are introduced to computer science with inspiring themes, e.g., game programming [8] and robots [7]. While longitudinal studies have been called for [20], K-12 studies often report on short-term extra-curricular activities.…”

“…While longitudinal studies have been called for [20], K-12 studies often report on short-term extra-curricular activities. The experiences reported of them are consistently positive [4,7,8,15].…”

“…We find that this challenge has been mitigated by tooling the game development properly [8,12], by letting the students start with a preprogrammed skeleton [14], and by emphasizing games that are of tolerable size [10].…”

“…Our faculty has worked with K-12 outreach starting from the same premise. For the last four summers we have arranged week-long summer game programming courses for middle and high school aged students [8,11]. The success of these summer courses (e.g.…”