Constructionism, long before it had a name, was intimately tied to the field of Artificial Intelligence. Soon after the birth of Logo at BBN, Seymour Papert set up the Logo Group as part of the MIT AI Lab. Logo was based upon Lisp, the first prominent AI programming language. Many early Logo activities involved natural language processing,…

Chess programming is an old and venerable branch of game development. In the modern computing environment, it encompasses the development of chess engines, chess user interfaces (UIs), chess tournament broadcast tools, chess databases, endgame tablebases (EGTBs) and opening books. In this paper, the author shares his multi-year experience of…

The study investigated the effect of Game Development-Based Learning (GDBL) on the ability of IT undergraduates in Jordanian universities to define the concepts of computer programming and Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) and their ability to program in C++. An instruction was designed for an eight-week-long online course to allow the…

Aim/Purpose: This research aims to describe and demonstrate the results of an intervention through educational robotics to improve the computational thinking of student teachers. Background: Educational robotics has been increasing in school classrooms for the development of computational thinking and digital competence. However, there is a lack…

This paper describes an investigation looking at the underlying mathematics of poker machines. The aim of the investigation is for students to get an appreciation of how poker machines are designed to ensure that in the long-term players will inevitably lose when playing. The first part of this paper describes how students can model a simple poker…

In order to be well-educated citizens in the 21st century, children need to learn computing in school. However, implementing computing education in schools faces several practical problems, such as a lack of computing teachers and time in an already overloaded curriculum. A solution may be a multidisciplinary approach, integrating computing…

Video and computer games have become an important area of study in the field of education. Games have been designed to teach mathematics, physics, raise social awareness, teach history and geography, and train soldiers in the military. Recent work has created computer games for teaching computer programming and understanding basic algorithms. …

Learning to program is difficult for novices, even for those undergraduates who have majored in computer science. The study described in this paper has investigated the effects of game strategy and preference-matching on novice learners' flow experience and performance in learning to program using an experiential gaming activity. One hundred and…

The paper uses Ludwig Wittgenstein's theories about the relationship between thought, language, and objects of the world to explore the assumption that OO-thinking resembles natural thinking. The paper imports from research in linguistic philosophy to computer science education research. I show how UML class diagrams (i.e., an artificial…