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Programming in game space: how to represent parallel programming concepts in an educational game

Published: 26 August 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Concurrent and parallel programming (CPP) skills are increasingly important in today's world of parallel hardware. However, the conceptual leap from deterministic sequential programming to CPP is notoriously challenging to make. Our educational game Parallel is designed to support the learning of CPP core concepts through a game-based learning approach, focusing on the connection between gameplay and CPP. Through a 10-week user study (n 25) in an undergraduate concurrent programming course, the first empirical study for a CPP educational game, our results show that Parallel offers both CPP knowledge and student engagement. Furthermore, we provide a new framework to describe the design space for programming games in general.

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  • (2024)RePresent: Enabling Access to Justice for Pro Se Litigants via Co-Authored Serious GamesProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3661632(3225-3242)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
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  • (2024)"Ah! I see" - Facilitating Process Reflection in Gameplay through a Novel Spatio-Temporal Visualization SystemProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642484(1-19)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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cover image ACM Other conferences
FDG '19: Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games
August 2019
822 pages
ISBN:9781450372176
DOI:10.1145/3337722
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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Association for Computing Machinery

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Published: 26 August 2019

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FDG '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 46 of 124 submissions, 37%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 152 of 415 submissions, 37%

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  • (2024)RePresent: Enabling Access to Justice for Pro Se Litigants via Co-Authored Serious GamesProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3661632(3225-3242)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Exploring Students Solutions to Concurrent and Parallel Programming Exercises – Impact of Generative AIProceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 210.1145/3632621.3671424(533-534)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2024
  • (2024)"Ah! I see" - Facilitating Process Reflection in Gameplay through a Novel Spatio-Temporal Visualization SystemProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642484(1-19)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)Open Player Modeling - Using AI to help Reflection and Learning in Serious GamesProceedings of the 39th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/3605098.3636117(95-97)Online publication date: 8-Apr-2024
  • (2024)Teaching Performance Metrics in Parallel Computing Courses2024 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops (IPDPSW)10.1109/IPDPSW63119.2024.00086(385-390)Online publication date: 27-May-2024
  • (2024)Physically Prototyping Physics for Play: Possibilities and Practicality2024 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG)10.1109/CoG60054.2024.10645608(1-8)Online publication date: 5-Aug-2024
  • (2024)Game Programming Meets Parallel Computing: Teaching Parallel Computing Concepts to Game ProgrammersProceedings of the 4th International Conference on Advances in Computational Science and Engineering10.1007/978-981-97-2977-7_2(17-31)Online publication date: 3-Sep-2024
  • (2023)"What else can I do?" Examining the Impact of Community Data on Adaptation and Quality of Reflection in an Educational GameProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3580664(1-12)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
  • (2023)Mining Player Behavior Patterns from Domain-Based Spatial Abstraction in Games2023 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG)10.1109/CoG57401.2023.10333224(1-8)Online publication date: 21-Aug-2023
  • (2023)Parallel OPM: A Visualization System for Analyzing Peers Board States for Gameplay Reflection2023 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG)10.1109/CoG57401.2023.10333145(1-2)Online publication date: 21-Aug-2023
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