Response to Wu's Castle: Teaching Arrays and Loops in a Game

1. What are motivations for this work?

*Show the reader that games can have a positive impact on teaching CS1 students arrays and loops by allowing them to visualize the execution of their code in a safe environment. Another way to combat attrition rates in computing by helping CS1 students gain a better grasp of programming concepts.

2. What is the proposed solution?

*Teachers using learning games such as Wu's Castle as homework assignments which show improvements in test scores amongst its players.

3.What is the evaluation of the proposed solution?

*The results of the pre and post test were recorded and compared among the three different groups.

a-What benefits or problems are identified?

*The benefits among the Game group show a consistent improvement on test scores of those that fully cooperated with the study. Some problems were with online delivery of the game some students had trouble installing the game, and since students played the game at home it was up to them to email the log files to the authors. Also the log files were difficult to parss through to collect the relevant data and future studys will use XML based log files.


b-What are the contributions?

*Most students enjoyed playing a game as homework for extra credit points. Students that participated typically improved their test scores and learned more about loops and arrays. The study exposed some problems with data collection which will improve the study for the future.

4.What are future directions for this research?

*Target CS2 students and show that games can be used to teach more difficult programming concepts as well as the intro concepts, but also the use of games to teach helps keep students in the computing majors.

a-What ideas did you come up with while reading the paper?

*I would think it would be preferred to allow students in large groups to play the game together in the lab to gain a lot of results quickly and be able to collect the log files personally. With the success of Wu's Castle these games should begin to make an appearance as homework in CS1 courses at UNC-Charlotte.