On the efficacy of board game strategy development as a first-year CS project

Bezáková, Ivona; Heliotis, James; Strout, Sean

doi:10.1145/2538862.2538904

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 15 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In CS as well as across the sciences, the concept of context-based learning has been deployed using many different domains. For example, biology [4], computing hardware [16], media computation [18], board, card, and dice games [5,8,2], and even science fiction [1] have been applied to CS topics. Oliviera et al compare context-based learning with abstract problem domains and report that "the type of domain (either concrete or abstract), when taken in and on itself, does not affect the learning of introductory programming," however, learning is influenced by whether students can relate to the domain or not, supporting the context-based learning paradigm [11,14].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pencil Puzzles for Introductory Computer Science

Butler

Bezáková

Fluet

2017

Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The teaching of introductory computer science can benefit from the use of real-world context to ground the abstract programming concepts. We present the domain of pencil puzzles as a context for a variety of introductory CS topics. Pencil puzzles are puzzles typically found in newspapers and magazines, intended to be solved by the reader through the means of deduction, using only a pencil. A well-known example of a pencil puzzle is Sudoku, which has been widely used as a typical backtracking assignment. However, there are dozens of other well-tried and liked pencil puzzles available that naturally induce computational thinking and can be used as context for many CS topics such as arrays, loops, recursion, GUIs, inheritance and graph traversal. Our contributions in this paper are two-fold. First, we present a few pencil puzzles and map them to introductory CS concepts that the puzzles can target in an assignment, and point the reader to other puzzle repositories which provide the potential to lead to an almost limitless set of introductory CS assignments. Second, we have formally evaluated the effectiveness of such assignments used at our institution over the past three years. Students reported that they have learned the material, believe they can tackle similar problems, and have improved their coding skills. The assignments also led to a significantly higher proportion of unsolicited statements of enjoyment, as well as metacognition, when compared to a traditional assignment for the same topic. Lastly, for all but one assignment, the student's gender or prior programming experience was independent of their grade, their perceptions of and reflection on the assignment.

show abstract