Abstract
Computational thinking is a discipline poorly mastered by elementary school teachers. To help teachers address these skills with their students, we develop the SPY game. In this paper we conduct a didactic analysis of the game and we propose a tool to describe the competencies targeted by the game based on game mechanics. The proposed tool has been applied to describe 21 of the 26 PIAF skills (a skills base on computational thinking). We show how these descriptions provide to teachers and designers micro information about the active skills in a level or macro information about the evolution of a game scenario complexity.
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Notes
- 1.
The user is in the external universe of the device.
- 2.
translated from french “une référence pour l’utilisateur relativement à laquelle la connaissance est cons-truite”.
- 3.
SPY: https://spy.lip6.fr/, accessed on March 6, 2023.
- 4.
SPY source code: https://github.com/Mocahteam/SPY, accessed on March 6, 2023.
- 5.
CRCN (Cadre de Référence des Compétences Numériques) is a french skills base inspired by the DigComp 2.1: https://eduscol.education.fr/document/20389/download, accessed April 7, 2023.
- 6.
translated from french “Lire et construire un algorithme qui comprend des instructions simples”.
- 7.
BlocklyMaze: https://blockly.games/maze, accessed April 10, 2023.
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Acknowledgements
The author acknowledges the support of the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), under grant ANR-18-CE38-0008 (project IECARE) and Stéphanie Chane Chick Te for her proofreading of this article.
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Muratet, M. (2023). How to Characterize and Analyze the Computational Thinking Skills of a Learning Game?. In: Viberg, O., Jivet, I., Muñoz-Merino, P., Perifanou, M., Papathoma, T. (eds) Responsive and Sustainable Educational Futures. EC-TEL 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14200. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42682-7_18
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