G4D - a treasure hunt game for novice programmers to learn debugging

Visual Programming Environments (VPEs) are predominantly being used to teach programming concepts through interactive games with interesting narratives. Games have been developed to teach basic concepts of programming such as deriving logic, writing code, debugging the code and so on. Debugging code...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Smart learning environments 2020-08, Vol.7 (1), p.1-21, Article 21
Main Authors: Venigalla, Akhila Sri Manasa, Chimalakonda, Sridhar
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Basic Skills
Computers and Education
Debugging
Debugging games
Education
Error correction
Games
Learning technologies
Logical Thinking
Novice programmers
Programmers
Programming
Programming environments
Syntax
Troubleshooting
Visual programming environments
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Summary:Visual Programming Environments (VPEs) are predominantly being used to teach programming concepts through interactive games with interesting narratives. Games have been developed to teach basic concepts of programming such as deriving logic, writing code, debugging the code and so on. Debugging code is one of the most important activities that can improve the skill of tackling a problem. In programming, one needs to identify the correct location of an error and fix it, which is usually learned through experience. Games have been developed to teach debugging to novice programmers. Syntactical errors occur frequently in the early stages of programming. The existing debugging games aim to support users in debugging the logic of the problem, but do not target on correcting the code snippets based on syntax. To address this challenge of providing syntactical support, we propose a treasure hunt based debugging game, in which users pass through various levels of the game by debugging code snippets written in C language. We have evaluated G4D based on MEEGA+ model, with 20 volunteers, having different programming backgrounds. The results of the user survey indicate that G4D has a good quality level and about 75% of the volunteers have either strongly agreed or agreed to recommend G4D to their colleagues.
ISSN:2196-7091
2196-7091
DOI:10.1186/s40561-020-00129-4