Andrew Hicks

Building Games to Learn from Their Players: Generating Hints in a Serious Game

This paper presents a method for generating hints based on observed world states in a serious game. BOTS is an educational puzzle game designed to teach programming fundamentals. To incorporate intelligent feedback in the form of personalized hints, we apply data-driven hint-generation methods. This is especially challenging for games like BOTS because of the open-ended nature of the problems. By using a modified representation of player data focused on outputs rather than actions, we are able to generate hints for players who are in similar (rather than identical) states, creating hints for multiple cases without requiring expert knowledge. Our contributions in this work are twofold. Firstly, we generalize techniques from the ITS community in hint generation to an educational game. Secondly, we introduce a novel approach to modeling student states for open-ended problems, like programming in BOTS. These techniques are potentially generalizable to programming tutors for mainstream languages.

Understanding problem solving behavior of 6–8 graders in a debugging game

Abstract Debugging is an over-looked component in K-12 computational thinking education. Few K-12 programming environments are designed to teach debugging, and most debugging research were conducted on college-aged students. In this paper, we presented debugging exercises to 6th–8th grade students and analyzed their problem solving behaviors in a programming game – BOTS. Apart from the perspective of prior literature, we identified student behaviors in relation to problem solving stages, and correlated these behaviors with student prior programming experience and performance. We found that in our programming game, debugging required deeper understanding than writing new codes. We also found that problem solving behaviors were significantly correlated with students’ self-explanation quality, number of code edits, and prior programming experience. This study increased our understanding of younger students’ problem solving behavior, and provided actionable suggestions to the future design of debugging exercises in BOTS and similar environments.

Creation, evaluation, and presentation of user-generated content in community game-based tutors

Games have been shown to be useful as learning tools, and much literature explores the use of games instead of traditional assignments or as supplementary teaching tools. However, creation of content for these games consumes tremendous resources in terms of time and expert knowledge, and use of games in this way fails to utilize many of the unique advantages games have to offer as a platform for learning content. We propose the use of social gaming mechanics for learning game; content-creation mechanics which will keep students involved in the game long after the original assignment, and result in a constantly growing and changing game environment in which players can continue to practice and refine their skills. We believe that the creation, evaluation, and implementation of user-generated content in social serious games has the potential to revolutionize the way games are used as cyberlearning tools, and that through motivating students to create and share, educators can capitalize on another pathway to learning through creative gameplay.

Creation of a game-based digital layer for increased museum engagement among digital natives

The combined hardships of economic downturn and a target audience that is increasingly defined by their affinity for active participation in their surroundings have left many nonprofit museums struggling to remain relevant in the 21st Century. We have partnered with Discovery Place, a hands-on science museum in Charlotte, North Carolina in order to create an easy-to-integrate software solution to help them better engage their audience. Our project is the creation of a three-part digital layer to increase museum engagement for all visitors, but particularly those considered digital natives. We have created two systems to be implemented in the museum, one to appeal to traditional visitors and one to better engage large groups of students. In the future, these two systems will be tied to an online meta-game to complete our digital layer by bringing the enhanced museum experience home for visitors.

Making games and apps in introductory computer science (abstract only)

The new CS Principles curriculum, a pilot Advanced Placement course, offers novice students an exciting opportunity to learn computing in a hands-on, fun way. High school and college teachers of introductory computer science course are invited to this workshop to learn basic game and mobile phone development. Participants will learn GameMaker, AppInventor, and Touch Develop. These tools allow students to create and have fun with computing while teaching object-oriented and event-driven programming and game architectures. Participants should bring their own laptops (ideally with AppInventor installed). Windows 7 phones will be provided during the workshop. We will provide links to curricular modules for the CS Principles: Beauty and Joy of Computing course.

Augmenting introductory computer science classes with GameMaker and mobile apps (abstract only)

Students often take computing classes because they are eager to create games, to learn to create meaningful and useful software, or both. Connecting computing to real, cutting-edge applications has been shown to increase engagement of women and minorities. The new CS Principles curriculum, a pilot Advanced Placement course, seeks to broaden the participation in computing to a larger and more diverse audience. This curriculum emphasizes that computing is a creative activity where people work together to solve relevant problems. In this workshop, we introduce free software and curricula to enable novice high school and college students in a first computing course to learn basic game and mobile phone development. We discuss how these activities facilitate teaching high school and non-major (CS0) course topics, but they can also be used to illustrate more advanced topics. Participants will learn GameMaker and mobile phone programming using AppInventor, and/or Touch Develop. These tools allow students to create and have fun with computing while teaching object-oriented and event-driven programming and game architectures. If possible, Windows 7 phones will be provided for use during the workshop. We will provide links to curricular modules for the CS Principles: Beauty and Joy of Computing course, as well as links to the GameMaker, AppInventor, and Touch Develop platforms and tutorials. Participants must bring a network-connected laptop with a modern browser, and the latest version of Java (ideally with AppInventor installed), and may optionally bring an Android or Windows 7 phone.