Principles of a debugging-first puzzle game for computing education

Abstract

Figure 1. Gidget's level design mode (the Gidget character is circled). In this mode, learners design their own levels for others to solve. Players write code (left) that can include graphics (right), and see animated results (middle), and graphics for the level are on the right. Corvallis, Oregon, USA Abstract-Although there are many systems designed to engage people in programming, few explicitly teach the subject, expecting learners to acquire the necessary skills on their own as they create programs from scratch. We present a principled approach to teach programming using a debugging game called Gidget, which was created using a unique set of seven design principles. A total of 44 teens played it via a lab study and two summer camps. Principle by principle, the results revealed strengths, problems, and open questions for the seven principles. Taken together, the results were very encouraging: learners were able to program with conditionals, loops, and other programming concepts after using the game for just 5 hours.

Effective Teaching Methods and Proposed Web Libraries for Designing Animated Course Content: A Review

“…Algorithm design concepts needed more thorough explanations and help. Similar improvement was observed in both males (64%) and females (58%) which seemed to be encouraging [4].…”

“…In 2014 researchers like Lee, Bahmani, Kwan, Laferte, Charters, Horvath and Fanny luor et al worked on seven principles listed below to see their influence on novice programmers [4].…”

“…The experimental study was conducted during the summer camp with a median age of 13.5 years. The primary purpose of this work was to find answers to the following research question [4].…”

“…Researcher tried to find answers to above stated objective by studying various barriers [4]. The article showed noticeable improvement in algorithm design barriers (19%) v/s learning phase barriers (51%).…”

An Exploratory Qualitative and Quantitative Study into the Effectiveness of Digital Games as a Tool to Enhance the Learning of Introductory Programming

“…To the best of our knowledge, there have been many studies that were conducted to review the effectiveness of using games for teaching and learning programming from different angles and perspective of learning coding. Our list of literature review shows amongst the others, include (1) Interactive Story-telling using Alice and Scratch [6][7], (2) Using simple maze-like problem solving games that appeals to both young learners as well as adults to learn popular languages like JavaScript and Python as in Code.org [8] and (3) Debugging-first approach to learning programming concepts via Gidget [9].…”