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FunPlogs – A Serious Puzzle Mini-game for Learning Fundamental Programming Principles Using Visual Scripting

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Abstract

Learning to program can be a tedious task for students. The intrinsic motivation towards games can help to facilitate the first steps in such learning tasks. In this paper we introduce FunPlogs – a serious puzzle mini-game for learning fundamental programming principles. We use visual scripting aspects within this game. These must be used by the students to solve spatial puzzle-like tasks. Within this game we integrate a user-driven content creation approach for the game, so that students can cooperatively create new levels. We show the feasibility of the game concept in a prototype implementation and indicate a high joy of use during a user study.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    www.squeakland.org (Accessed 22.08.2019).

  2. 2.

    https://vrtoolkit.readme.io/ (Accessed 03.04.2019).

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Acknowledgements

The work is supported by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany in the project Innovative Hochschule (funding number: 03IHS071).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. RheinMain University of Applied Sciences, Wiesbaden, Germany

    Robin Horst, Ramtin Naraghi-Taghi-Off, Savina Diez, Tobias Uhmann, Arne Müller & Ralf Dörner

Authors
  1. Robin Horst
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  2. Ramtin Naraghi-Taghi-Off
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  3. Savina Diez
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  4. Tobias Uhmann
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  5. Arne Müller
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  6. Ralf Dörner
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Robin Horst .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Nevada, Reno, NV, USA

    George Bebis

  2. NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA, USA

    Richard Boyle

  3. University of Nevada, Reno, NV, USA

    Bahram Parvin

  4. Desert Research Institute, Reno, NV, USA

    Darko Koracin

  5. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Daniela Ushizima

  6. Latent AI, Palo Alto, CA, USA

    Sek Chai

  7. Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

    Shinjiro Sueda

  8. Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA

    Xin Lin

  9. University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, USA

    Aidong Lu

  10. École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Daniel Thalmann

  11. Notre Dame University, Notre Dame, IN, USA

    Chaoli Wang

  12. Bosch Research North America, Palo Alto, CA, USA

    Panpan Xu

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Horst, R., Naraghi-Taghi-Off, R., Diez, S., Uhmann, T., Müller, A., Dörner, R. (2019). FunPlogs – A Serious Puzzle Mini-game for Learning Fundamental Programming Principles Using Visual Scripting. In: Bebis, G., et al. Advances in Visual Computing. ISVC 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11844. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33720-9_38

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33720-9_38

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-33719-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-33720-9

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