Abstract
Most first year computer science students find that learning object-oriented programming is hard. Serious games have ever been used as one approach to handle this problem. But most of them cannot be played with mobile devices. This obviously does not suit the era of mobile computing that intends to allow students to learn programming skills in anytime anywhere. To enhance mobile teaching and learning, a research project started over a year ago and aims to create a mobile device based serious gaming approach along with a serious game for enhancing mobile teaching and learning for Java programming. So far the project has completed a literature review for understanding existing work and identifying problems in this area, conducted a survey for eliciting students’ requirements for mobile gaming approach, and then established a mobile-device based serious gaming approach with a developed prototype of the game. This paper introduces the project in details, and in particularly presents and discusses its current results. It is expected that the presented project will be helpful and useful to bring more efficient approaches with new mobile games into teaching object-oriented programming and to enhance students’ learning experiences.
Highlights
In the last few years usage of mobile phones has rapidly increased and become more and more important to our daily life: check e-mails, surf in the Internet, chat with friends, play games, etc
Young students are using their mobile phones as modern communication devices and for playing mobile games [1]
The current development of mobile phones has made it even more realistic to use mobile-device based games as a new approach for teaching and learning subjects that are often difficult to teach and learn with traditional approaches in education. This finding triggered the authors to start a research project for creating a new mobile-device based serious gaming approach for teaching and learning Java programming, as traditional approaches are often insufficient in such teaching and learning and our literature review has found that existing programming learning approaches often use desktop computers and currently there is no approach provided for teaching and learning Java programming using mobile phones, even though Java is one of the most popular object oriented programming language [3], [4] and often taught by universities for programming introduction
Summary
Abstract—Most first year computer science students find that learning object-oriented programming is hard. Most of them cannot be played with mobile devices. This obviously does not suit the era of mobile computing that intends to allow students to learn programming skills in anytime anywhere. To enhance mobile teaching and learning, a research project started over a year ago and aims to create a mobile device based serious gaming approach along with a serious game for enhancing mobile teaching and learning for Java programming. It is expected that the presented project will be helpful and useful to bring more efficient approaches with new mobile games into teaching object-oriented programming and to enhance students’ learning experiences
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