As elementary students begin to program using tangible blocks, they must coordinate their use of counting with the movements, directions, and numbers they use to move a character. In our study, we analyzed 13 first graders' first attempts at coordinating these elements when playing a programming game on the iPad that used tangible programming…

Programming promotes critical thinking, problem solving and analytic skills through creating solutions that can solve everyday problems. However, learning programming can be a daunting experience for a lot of students. "RunJumpCode" is an educational 2D platformer video game, designed and developed in Unity, to teach players the…

A typical first computer science course (CS1) introduces the student to coding conventions, variables, methods, control structures, conditionals, and the semantics of classes and objects. Advanced concepts of inheritance, polymorphism, abstract classes, interfaces, and their use in the design process, are covered in a second-level course (CS2).…

In an era where computational thinking is regarded as a basic skill for the 21st century that needs to be taught across the K-12 curriculum, research shows that teacher education programs do not adequately prepare preservice teachers to promote computational thinking skills in classroom teaching. Accordingly, the present study contributes to the…

In an educational environment, instructors would always think of ways to provide students with motivational learning materials and efficient learning strategies. Hence, many researchers have proposed that students' problem-solving ability enhances their learning. Problem-solving ability plays an important role for users in dealing with problems…

Level creation is a creative game-play exercise that resembles problem-posing, and has shown to be engaging and helpful for players to learn about the game's core mechanic. However, in user-authoring environments, users often create levels without considering the game's objective, or with entirely different objectives in mind, resulting in levels…

Serious games seem to be a promising alternative to traditional practices for learning. Recently, their use in computer science education and learning programming became more widespread. Actually, many students in programming courses have difficulties to master all required competencies and skills especially at introductory level and games have…

Data-driven methods have been a successful approach to generating hints for programming problems. However, the majority of previous studies are focused on procedural hints that aim at moving students to the next closest state to the solution. In this paper, I propose a data-driven method to generate remedy hints for BOTS, a game that teaches…

Among recent e-Learning Pedagogical Strategies, gaming and crisis-simulation games are increasingly used in recent years in university-learning and Blended-courses as an out-of-context effective tool for role-playing and education, especially in Law Schools and Business Schools. Gaming covers several sub-fields (war-games; Law School Mock-Trials;…

This study presents the findings of a systematic literature review on educational computer game development activity utilized in learning environments. The main aim of this review is to investigate the effects of game design activity on learning outcomes of students. Additionally, there are other factors examined in the review such as participant…

Teaching students to create computer games has become a common practice in both K-12 and tertiary education to introducing programming concepts, increasing student engagement, and recruiting majors and minors in technology fields. This study describes a project where first-year college students in an introductory technology concepts course use a…

ToonTalk is an animated interactive world inside of which one can construct a very large range of computer programs. These programs are not constructed by typing text or arranging icons, but by taking actions in this world. Robots can be trained, birds can be given messages to deliver, and so on. This paper describes the design and preliminary…