Abstract
Rapid developments in technology around the world require continuous efforts in academia to develop innovative solutions to enhance the learning of basic and advanced programming concepts. Educators understand the value of preparing highly skilled programmers to join the industry, and this puts a responsibility to develop and enhance teaching techniques in order to get better results, especially in introductory courses where novice programmers face difficulties in understanding basic programming concepts. Serious games were proven to be effective, motivational and beneficial for novice programmers to support them during their learning journey. In this paper, we investigate the issues that students face when learning arrays and based on that, we design and implement Space Geeks, a serious game targeted at teaching arrays for novice programmers. We discuss the design principles used to develop Space Geeks, and we test and evaluate the game in an educational environment. Our findings show that Space Geeks, our developed serious game, is promising to help novice programmers improve in learning basic programming concepts, due to its ease of use and ease of understanding.
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Assaf, A., Issa, L., Eshtay, M. (2023). Evaluating the Quality Characteristics of Space Geeks. In: Marchiori, M., Domínguez Mayo, F.J., Filipe, J. (eds) Web Information Systems and Technologies. WEBIST 2022. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 494. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43088-6_13
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