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Exploring Instructional Support Design in an Educational Game for K-12 Computing Education

Published: 21 February 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Instructional supports (Supports) help students learn more effectively in intelligent tutoring systems and gamified educational environments. However, the implementation and success of Supports vary by environment. We explored Support design in an educational programming game, BOTS, implementing three different strategies: instructional text (Text), worked examples (Examples) and buggy code (Bugs). These strategies are adapted from promising Supports in other domains and motivated by established educational theory. We evaluated our Supports through a pilot study with middle school students. Our results suggest Bugs may be a promising strategy, as demonstrated by the lower completion time and solution code length in assessment puzzles. We end reflecting on our design decisions providing recommendations for future iterations. Our motivations, design process, and study's results provide insight into the design of Supports for programming games.

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  • (2023)Investigating the Impact of On-Demand Code Examples on Novices' Open-Ended Programming ExperienceProceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 110.1145/3568813.3600141(464-475)Online publication date: 7-Aug-2023
  • (2023)Studying the effects of educational games on cultivating computational thinking skills to primary school students: a systematic literature reviewJournal of Computers in Education10.1007/s40692-023-00300-z11:4(1283-1325)Online publication date: 21-Nov-2023
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        cover image ACM Conferences
        SIGCSE '18: Proceedings of the 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
        February 2018
        1174 pages
        ISBN:9781450351034
        DOI:10.1145/3159450
        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 the author(s) 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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        Published: 21 February 2018

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        Author Tags

        1. cognitive load theory
        2. debugging
        3. instructional support
        4. programming game
        5. worked examples

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        View all
        • (2023)Investigating the Impact of On-Demand Code Examples on Novices' Open-Ended Programming ExperienceProceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 110.1145/3568813.3600141(464-475)Online publication date: 7-Aug-2023
        • (2023)Studying the effects of educational games on cultivating computational thinking skills to primary school students: a systematic literature reviewJournal of Computers in Education10.1007/s40692-023-00300-z11:4(1283-1325)Online publication date: 21-Nov-2023
        • (2022)Ingame Worked Examples Support as an Alternative to Textual Instructions in Serious Games About ProgrammingJournal of Educational Computing Research10.1177/0735633121107365560:7(1615-1636)Online publication date: 12-Feb-2022
        • (2022)Learning Computational Thinking EfficientlyProceedings of the 24th Australasian Computing Education Conference10.1145/3511861.3511869(66-75)Online publication date: 14-Feb-2022
        • (2022)Game-Based Learning: Enhancing Student Experience, Knowledge Gain, and Usability in Higher Education Programming CoursesIEEE Transactions on Education10.1109/TE.2021.313691465:4(502-513)Online publication date: Nov-2022
        • (2022)Playing coding games to learn computational thinking: What motivates students to use this tool at home?Education and Information Technologies10.1007/s10639-022-11181-728:1(193-216)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2022
        • (2021)Investigating the Impact of Computing vs Pedagogy Experience in Novices Creation of Computing-Infused CurriculaProceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3430665.3456319(255-261)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2021
        • (2020)Infusing Computing: A Scaffolding and Teacher Accessibility Analysis of Computing Lessons Designed by NovicesProceedings of the 20th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research10.1145/3428029.3428056(1-11)Online publication date: 19-Nov-2020
        • (2020)CrescendoProceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education10.1145/3328778.3366919(859-865)Online publication date: 26-Feb-2020
        • (2020)Engaging Students with Instructor Solutions in Online Programming HomeworkProceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3313831.3376857(1-7)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2020
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