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The craft of computer programming: lifting the veil

Published: 06 May 2010 Publication History

Abstract

We present the conceptual design and first-phase implementation of an approach to computer programming instruction that has been designed to exploit the attractive force of video games. We partition the skills that a professional programmer must master into a sequence of eight levels, where each level introduces new programming tasks that are to be implemented on a progressively more detailed machine architecture. Our approach is intended to foster a conceptual understanding of the internal representation of data, and the underlying operations being performed on the data by an instruction sequence. To motivate the student programmer, our approach is designed to be integrated into a video game where, to progress through the levels of the game, the player must also progress through the levels of programming tasks. After completing all levels the player of such a game would have a thorough mastery of fundamental programming skills, including array indexing, recursion and pointer variables, coupled with a solid understanding of the underlying computational model and the von Neuman architecture.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
Futureplay '10: Proceedings of the International Academic Conference on the Future of Game Design and Technology
May 2010
282 pages
ISBN:9781450302357
DOI:10.1145/1920778
  • Conference Chairs:
  • Bill Kapralos,
  • Andrew Hogue,
  • Simon Xu
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 06 May 2010

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Futureplay '10
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Futureplay '10: Futureplay '10 @ GDC Canada
May 6 - 7, 2010
British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

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