MUPPETS: multi-user programming pedagogy for enhancing traditional study

• Authors: Andrew M. Phelps;Kevin J. Bierre;David M. Parks
• Venue: CITC4 '03 Proceedings of the 4th conference on Information technology curriculum
• Year: 2003

Through capitalizing on research in the areas of gaming and virtual community social psychology, RIT is engaged in a project to develop a Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) entitled "The Multi-User Programming Pedagogy for Enhancing Traditional Study" (MUPPETS). The MUPPETS system will be aimed specifically at engaging upper-division students in the education of lower-division students through their first-year programming core. The authors have built upon existing research and technical developments in the field to design and construct a CVE and supporting infrastructure that allows students to write very simple Java code similar to, and constructed around the same pedagogical issues as, code written in a more traditional course of first year study. As part of the MUPPETS system, however, this code can now control objects in a shared virtual world very much like an online massively-multiplayer game that many prospective students are already familiar with. Upper level students also populate the system in a structure of their own, and this population will be aimed at encouraging and rewarding student engagement and peer knowledge-transmission.The use of the freshman year to provide a programming core is not unique to Information Technology programs, and is in fact implemented (and also problematic) at most institutions with programs in computing. It is the opinion of the authors that while there is moderate success in many of these programs, there is a rapidly occurring shift in the overall student population such that students are no longer as interested or engaged in their coursework as they were in previous years, and this apathy can be seen in spectacular fashion during the first year programming core. This is attributed to the fact that unlike the applications that many students are motivated to build, the first year experience is often centered on non-visual applications, and/or problems that hold no particular interest for first-year students.(This is largely because first-year classes cannot move beyond basic techniques, since the population is just beginning to master programming techniques.) Because universities around the world are currently faced with the issue of how best to engage students in programming coursework, this study, once conducted, should be interesting to a large number of institutions at several academic levels. This paper focuses on the first year of development of the MUPPETS system, and presents tentative results based on trials conducted in first-year programming courses at the Rochester Institute of Technology.