Games for CS education: computer-supported collaborative learning and multiplayer games

• Authors: Andrea Nickel;Tiffany Barnes
• Venue: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games
• Year: 2010

Today's Millennial students have changing preferences for education and work environments that negatively affect their enrollment and retention rates into university computer science programs. To better suit these preferences, and to improve CS educational techniques, teaching methods and tools outside of the traditional lecture sessions and textbooks must be explored and implemented. Currently, both serious games and collaborative classroom work, including pair programming, are the focus of studies meant to do just this. The proposed work deals with both serious games and student collaboration research, positing that educational games with collaborative elements (multiplayer games) will take advantage of the benefits offered by each of these areas, resulting in an educational game that demonstrates increased learning gains and student engagement above that of individual learning game experiences. Collaborative educational games and software also have the potential to solve many of the problems that collaborative work may pose to course instructors in terms of helping to regulate and evaluate student performance.