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Gaming Together, Coding Together: Collaborative Pathways to Computational Learning

Published: 03 March 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Collaborative, playful learning represents an important avenue to mastering a range of skills within computer science education. This research presents findings from interviews with 9 members of an online community that started out as a gaming league and transitioned into a game development team. Community members learned programming skills to contribute their ideas to the game and participate in activities based around game development. Drawing on these experiences, we identify key elements from informal learning that can improve computer science education: 1) playful projects can help learners overcome barriers to participating in computer science; 2) community closeness facilitates a collaborative learning environment to support developing expertise in specific computational skills. We consider these findings in the context of learning as an everyday social practice, and discuss means of developing playful learning communities in computer science classrooms.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGCSE 2023: Proceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1
March 2023
1481 pages
ISBN:9781450394314
DOI:10.1145/3545945
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: 03 March 2023

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Author Tags

  1. communities of practice
  2. computing education
  3. informal learning
  4. video games

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