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Designing Programming Games for Diversity in Teaching Introductory Programming

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ICT Education (SACLA 2020)

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.

Supported by the Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Engineering HPI, the National Research Foundation of South Africa (Grant numbers: 85470 and 88209) and University of Cape Town.

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Acknowledgements

This research was partially funded by the Hasso Plattner Institute, the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa (Grant numbers: 85470 and 88209) and University of Cape Town. The authors acknowledge that opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are that of the authors, and that the NRF accepts no liability whatsoever in this regard.

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Correspondence to Jecton Tocho Anyango .

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Anyango, J.T., Suleman, H. (2021). Designing Programming Games for Diversity in Teaching Introductory Programming. In: Wells, G., Nxozi, M., Tait, B. (eds) ICT Education. SACLA 2020. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1518. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92858-2_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92858-2_2

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