Designing Programming Games for Diversity in Teaching Introductory Programming

Anyango, Jecton Tocho and Suleman, Hussein (2020) Designing Programming Games for Diversity in Teaching Introductory Programming, Proceedings of Annual Conference of the Southern African Computer Lecturers’ Association (SACLA), 6-9 July 2020, Virtual.

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Abstract

Diverse learners from different backgrounds present both significant instructional design challenges and opportunities. Particularly in programming, most serious games that have been created to aid lecturers lack support for diversity. As a result, domain experts who may wish to adopt a Game Based Learning (GBL) approach lack diverse games that are relevant to their local contexts. This paper reports on the design considerations necessary to create diverse programming games for teaching recursion to different novice students. Interviews were conducted with 17 introductory programming (CS1) lecturers from Kenya and South Africa. This was followed by qualitative thematic content analysis. Findings were reviewed by a game expert to validate them from a games design perspective. Results suggest that student background, gender, and culture as well as other factors such as local context, game attributes, pedagogy and practical teaching aspects are core to creating diverse programming games targeting different learners in this generation.

Item Type:	Conference paper
Subjects:	Social and professional topics > Professional topics > Computing education
Date Deposited:	21 Dec 2020 11:27
Last Modified:	21 Dec 2020 11:27
URI:	http://pubs.cs.uct.ac.za/id/eprint/1405

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