Evaluating design elements for digital educational games on programming: a pilot study

Authors:
Stephanie Heintz;Effie Lai-Chong Law
Affiliations:
University of Leicester, Leicester, UK;University of Leicester, Leicester, UK
Venue:
BCS-HCI '12 Proceedings of the 26th Annual BCS Interaction Specialist Group Conference on People and Computers
Year:
2012

Citing 4
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Abstract

Digital educational games (DEGs) are increasingly recognized as a promising tool for learning. To deepen the understanding of how two key components - content and player - of DEG contribute to learning effects, we developed a model on game elements. It informed the creation of a mini-game on programming, which was evaluated with 50 computer science undergraduates as a pilot study. Data were collected with questionnaires on background, domain-specific knowledge as well as user perception and with a screen cast recorder. Results show that most of the design requirements derived from the model were met. Pre-knowledge was found to be a significant factor influencing user perception. Implications to future work on implementing design elements such as feedback are drawn.