Supporting CS Trainee Teachers with Game Authoring Tools

Anyango, Jecton and Suleman, Hussein (2021) Supporting CS Trainee Teachers with Game Authoring Tools, Proceedings of SAICSIT ’21: Conference of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists, 14-15 September 2021, Online.

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Abstract

Despite the current evidence suggesting the potential of game-based learning (GBL) in education, developing serious games remains difficult, time consuming and expensive. This leads to low adoption of GBL in mainstream teaching. In particular, CS trainee teachers are not likely to develop and adopt serious games when they just begin teaching programming. To address this problem, we design and conduct empirical evaluation of a prototype game authoring tool called the Recursive Game Generator (RGG). The tool is aimed at supporting CS educators with little game programming skills. 22 CS trainee teachers evaluated RGG using the standard Attrakdiff questionnaire. A good user experience was indicated through the results of the scale mean scores. Meanwhile, the mean values of word pairs showed that respondents found the prototype: (i) usable for achieving goals; (ii) supportive in terms of novelty, content and stimulation; and (iii) attractive. Additionally, 70% of the participants found the approach of game generation a good idea for aiding CS teachers while another 65% noted that the generated games were interactive, practical, interesting and fun, demonstrating the tool’s potential educational value. Consequently, findings from this study may provide an opportunity for inexperienced computing teachers to embrace the idea of game generation to support the teaching and learning of difficult CS1 concepts.

Item Type:	Conference paper
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Attrakdiff CS CS1 trainee teachers game design game generator authoring UX user experience recursion
Subjects:	Social and professional topics > Professional topics > Computing education > Computing education programs > Computer science education > CS1
Date Deposited:	03 Dec 2021 11:38
Last Modified:	03 Dec 2021 11:38
URI:	https://pubs.cs.uct.ac.za/id/eprint/1511

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