While more universities are including IT accessibility in their computer science programs for undergraduate and graduate students, there is little accessibility training available for K-12 teachers. We created an intervention through which postsecondary students had opportunities to experience five computer games with a simulated impairment…

Although there is wide rhetoric that programming should be learnt by all as an element of computational thinking (CT), in practice, it is mostly implemented narrowly as an end in itself consisting of routine practice and traditional testing of the ability to code. This paper discusses a way in which programming could be seen through a wider…

This article is a commentary essay that uses the connected learning framework (Ito et al., 2013) as a lens to explore the relationship between making, coding, and critical literacy in the context of literacy teacher education. Critical literacy theorists have argued that it is important to understand the perspective and positionality of an author…

This article reports on a project that used a game-creation tool to introduce middle-school students ages 10 to 13 to problem-solving strategies similar to those in computer science through the lens of studio-based design arts. Drawing on historic paradigms in design pedagogy and contemporary educational approaches in the digital arts to teach…

Gamification of language learning is a clear trend of recent years. Widespread use of smartphones and the rise of mobile gaming as a popular leisure activity contribute to the popularity of gamification, as application developers can rely on an unprecedented reach of their products and expect acceptance of game-like elements by the users. In terms…

This article considers game design research in educational settings. Its focus is on how undergraduate students -- particularly engineering students -- learn computer game design. From observations conducted during our game design courses we have developed a model of expanded game design space. It encapsulates the entire development process from…

Computer science is continuously evolving during the past decades. This has also brought forth new knowledge that should be incorporated and new learning strategies must be adopted for the successful teaching of all sub-domains. For example, computer programming is a vital knowledge area within computer science with constantly changing curriculum…

In this design case, we present an instructional design project that resulted in a French language learning game development system. What we describe here is not the game itself, but rather the pedagogical intervention that created what the design team termed a mobile "application farm," which in turn produced the game. The term…

A group of first-semester engineering students participated in a game design course. The aim of the course was to learn how to design computer games and programming skills by creating their own games, thereby applying their game-playing experiences to gain knowledge about game design. The aim was for students to develop a more critically…

Over the past 3 years, the authors have pursued unique cross-college collaboration. They have hosted a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)-funded Humanities Gaming Institute and team-taught a cross-listed course that brought together students from the humanities and computer science. Currently, they are overseeing the development of an…

Carefully engineered playable games can serve as vehicles for students and practitioners to learn and explore the programming of advanced computer architectures to execute applications, such as high performance computing (HPC) and complex, inter-networked, distributed systems. The article presents families of playable games that are grounded in…

Programming is a fundamental component of modern society. Programming and its applications influence much of how people work and interact. Because of people's reliance on programming in one or many of its applications, there is a need to teach students to be programming literate. Because the purpose of the International Technology and Engineering…

The aim of this paper is to describe a digital game with an educational purpose in the subject of computer programming, which enables students to reinforce and improve their abilities on the concepts of sequencing, defined iteration and nesting. For its design, a problem solving approach was followed and a score comparing mechanism was implemented…

From 2004-2007, the University of Memphis carried out the NSF-funded Tri-P-LETS (Three P Learning Environment for Teachers and Students) project to improve local high-school computer science curricula. The project reached a total of 58 classrooms in eleven high schools emphasizing problem solving skills, programming concepts as opposed to syntax,…

This paper describes a game design and development course. The rationale for forming this class was to use student excitement with video games as an intrinsic motivation over traditional courses. Today's students have grown up exposed to gaming, interactive environments, and vivid 3D. Computer gaming has the capacity to attract many new students…