Solomon Sunday Oyelere
Jarkko Suhonen
ABSTRACT
Understanding of elementary programming concepts, logic, and syntax is a vital part of learning to program. Unfortunately, learning programming is found to be difficult and boring, especially for novices. For example, drill type of exercises designed for learning elementary programming can be very tedious, making it hard to motivate learners. This study focused on the development of a mobile application, which integrates puzzle-based Parson's programming exercises into a strategy board game with the aim of facilitating the teaching and learning of programming. With the mobile application, learners play Ayo, a variant of the famous traditional African strategy board game Mancala. In each round of the game, the learners will solve a Parson's puzzle, which consist of small programming tasks where students are required to build programs by drag and drop, selection, indenting and ordering code fragments. The proposed solution of integrating the Parson's puzzles to Ayo game provides a new perspective on how to use mobile devices in programming education. The long-term aim of our work is to create a framework for integrating board games into computing education. The study reported in the article is the first step towards creating the framework.
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Index Terms
- Integrating parson's programming puzzles into a game-based mobile learning application
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