Robot on!

Abstract

A number of educational games have been created to help students programming. Many of these games focus on problem solving and the actual act of writing programs, while very few focus on programming comprehension. We introduce a serious game called Robot ON! aimed at players who have never programmed before. Unlike other serious programming games, Robot ON! focuses on comprehension rather than problem-solving challenges; players do not actually write any programs, but are instead given the task of demonstrating their knowledge and understanding of a program's behavior. Robot ON! includes tools that allow players to demonstrate understanding of variable values, data types, program statements, and control flow. We include an evaluation plan to assess Robot ON!'s playability, enjoyment, and benefits to program comprehension.

Gamification in Engineering Education in Canada: A Systematic Review of the Literature

“…Freedom to Fail and Rapid Feedback (40% each) were also common game elements adopted by educators. Freedom to Fail was usually present by allowing students to have more than one attempt to complete an activity [22] or to finish a game [23]. Rapid Feedback is usually tightly linked to Freedom to Fail, almost as a constraint, since students need to know as soon as possible whether they succeeded or not in order to proceed to the next task or retry the previous one.…”

“…Rapid Feedback [4,20,[22][23][24]27] Freedom of Choice [9,20,24,25,27] Freedom to Fail [4,20,[22][23][24]27] Narrative [20][21][22][23][24] Competition [9,21,22,[25][26][27] Cooperation [21,22,25,27] Points [7,9,25,28] Badges [9,11] Leaderboards [9] Leveling Up Progress Bar and Unlocks [4,9,22,27] Game Level [4,23] External Rewards [9,22,26] For gauging the success of the intervention, the survey instrument was the most frequent evaluation metric used by authors, which was present in 8 out of the 15 papers (53%). While 5 out of these 8 papers had the survey as their only metric, the other 3 used this ins...…”

A Cross-Platform Mobile Application for Learning Programming Basics

“…After that, students would be able to learner any new programming language. Some researchers pointed out that learning a programming language could be fostered through practical situation [7] using problem solving educational approach [8]. Another common problem revealed by many teachers is: the difference between the natural language and a programming language.…”