Browsing by Author "Van Niekerk, Leon"

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    The development and evaluation of an electronic serious game aimed at the education of core programming skills
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2016-12) Van Niekerk, Leon; Watson, Bruce W.; Van Rooyen, Gert-Jan; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Information Science.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The integration of information technology with everyday life has increased the demand for the number of programmers and computer scientists, yet the number of students moving into these fields professionally has not kept up with this demand. Education, and fostering interest is one potential way to increase the number of students moving into these fields. While good teachers and schools can develop this interest in students, this research explores the use of an educational serious game to both teach students the fundamentals of programming, while also increasing their interest in the field. Serious games are digital games with a primary purpose other than entertainment. In the case of this research, the purpose is education. A prototype serious game was developed to teach students the concepts and processes involved in programming and algorithmic development, rather than the writing of programming code. Abstract symbols represent blocks of conceptual code, which can be manipulated by the player in order to “program” solutions for predefined problems. In addition, the research called for testing the prototype. For this purpose, introductory programming students at the University of Stellenbosch were approached as test subjects. These students were asked firstly to complete a language-agnostic programming aptitude questionnaire, also developed as part of the research, at the start and end of their semester; and secondly, a subset was asked to play the game during the semester. Several metrics were gathered from these tests, namely, their university marks for the course, the results of the language-agnostic aptitude test, the previous programming and mathematics experience of the students, and an opinion questionnaire from the subset of students who played the game. While student fallout throughout the course was expected, the small class size and voluntary nature of their involvement in the study led to an unexpectedly low number of usable data points. However, it was possible to obtain the course marks from the students without their involvement. Thus, the test results were used in conjunction with the valid university course marks to establish a conclusion. Students who played the prototype scored significantly better in the quantitative tests than those who did not. This in combination with the results of other earlier studies indicate that games can be used as tools for the enhancement of the learning process.