Designing Visual Metaphors for an Educational Game for Parallel Programming

Abstract

Modern computing is increasingly handled in a parallel fashion, however, little is known about how individuals learn parallel programming. This paper focuses on the design of an educational game called Parallel, designed for both teaching parallel programming education for CS undergraduate curricula, as well as for gathering insights into how students learn, and solve parallel programming problems. Specifically, we focus on the key challenge of choosing the appropriate metaphors in order to facilitate transference between parallel programming and the game. In this paper, we describe our design methodology and results from our preliminary user evaluations.

Methods and tools for teaching parallel and distributed computing in universities: a systematic review of the literature

“…When considering methods of teaching parallel and distributed computing, the authors of the article pay attention to the following methods: a course of laboratory work that addresses selected topics or paradigms of parallel and distributed programming [1], [26]; course of lectures and laboratory work -here the authors give a complete theme of the course, which they teach: topics of lectures and laboratory work [3], [15]; some authors [2]; [8] introduce in the course of laboratory work with visualization of parallel computing, which according to the authors should promote the development of parallel thinking in students; some authors consider it appropriate to use the project method for laboratory work on real practical tasks [21] or team [31]. For a better understanding of the stages of concurrent programming, one of the authors [23] proposes to introduce a course on parallel programming , 0 https://doi.org/10.1051/ conf/20 SHS Web of Conferences 75 4017 (2020) shs 207504017 ICHTML 2020 in the form of a game. According to the author, this will improve the formation of students in "parallel thinking".…”

“…It should be noted separately several experimental studies on the implementation in the parallel programming of integrated programming environments or programming languages developed by the authors of the studies themselves [12,23,28]. Y. Wepathana states that students should consider different concurrent architectures and programming models in their learning process.…”

Non-Deterministic Computational Thinking

“…However, curricula teach beginning students to think sequentially, that is, one instruction at a time. New projects for practical solutions that depend on knowledge of computer science support the need to include parallel computational thinking in the teaching and learning process in schools [14]. Therefore, breaking a big problem into small sub-problems (and using divide-and-conquer methodologies or pipelines) is part of computational thinking that is still little explored [16].…”

A Game-Based Approach for Helping Designers Learn Machine Learning Concepts

“…Game-based learning is frequently used to help students learn a wide variety of concepts [19] such as design [21], CSS [24], and computational thinking [9,23,47]. In programming and computational thinking games, a common game metaphor is to allow users to control a "robot" or "agent" and help this agent accomplish tasks or solve puzzles [9,28,37]. Of course, this application comes with new challenges.…”