Olga Shabalina

Game-Based Technologies in Teaching Programming in Higher Education: Theory and Practices

BACKGROUND: The trend of new emerging technologies has impact upon teaching and learning in Higher Education Institutions. Consequently, emphasis is placed on digital pedagogy and its support to knowledge creation. Further, it seems to be essential to understand the learning theories and their contribution to learning in HEIs within this digital age. METHODS: One of the most powerful technologies is the digital game –based technology. Knowing its rapid development, this research emphasizes the importance of programming and game construction as well as the principles of digital pedagogy, required to be embedded when designing such technologies. Today’s students have grown up in a digital and internet connected world where playing computer games is a common spare time activity. Could the energy, enthusiasm and practice generated by computer games be used in programming education? RESULTS: This article describes and discusses the design and learning outcomes of some programming courses using the concept of learning to program by game construction. In a case study the course analyses have been combined with two literature reviews on Game Based Learning and Digital Pedagogy. CONCLUSION: Findings show that the idea of students constructing knowledge from their interactions with the environment has support in the modern pedagogy that draws on the theories by Piaget and Vygotsky. Practical applications of these concepts have had successful outcomes and increased student motivation in the two described and analyzed programming courses.

Creativity-Based Learning versus Game-Based Learning

One of the most challenging trends in modern education is creativitybased learning. Creativity in learning has been recognized, during the last part of the 20th century and early 21st, to be increasingly significant as a skill to be covered in the formal education. Digital game-based learning appears to deliver the most effective way of providing creativity in digital learning environments. The paper considers a modern approach of using digital game-based technologies for creative teaching and learning. Firstly, the meaning of “digital learning environment” and its relation with creative digital learning is discussed. Then, several applications of using game-based learning techniques for improving creative digital learning are presented. Practical solutions for problems of creative learning and creative teaching are shown. Each case-study is followed by explanation of techniques which could be used for the development of digital learning environments implementing creativity-based learning principles.

Performance Analysis of Alternative Open Source Parallel Computing Approach to OpenMP on Multicore Processors

In this era of evolving computing field, parallel computing is one of the fastest changing fields. There have been numerous researches made and still the research is going on in the areas of data decomposition, parallel algorithms to get more performance through parallelism. In this paper we have achieved parallelism by using an open source made available with the name libdispatch (implementation of Grand Central Dispatch Services). This package has been ported to the FreeBSD, however this can also be used under open source environment. In this paper we have experimented with matrix multiplication in sequential and parallel programs. The categories of experimentation done are: Sequential Programming with GCC and Clang; Parallel programming with OpenMP and clang with dispatcher. Better performance has been observed in Clang for both sequential and parallel computations