Abstract
The recent shift in compulsory education from ICT-focused computing curricula to informatics, digital literacy and computer science, has resulted in children being taught computing using block-based programming tools such as Scratch, with teaching that is often limited by school resources and teacher expertise. Even without these limitations, Scratch users often produce code with ‘code smells’ such as duplicate blocks and long scripts which impact how they understand and debug projects. These code smells can be removed using procedural abstraction, an important concept in computer science rarely taught to this age group. This article describes the design of a novel educational block-based programming game, Pirate Plunder, which concentrates on how procedural abstraction is introduced and reinforced. The article then reports an extended evaluation to measure the game’s efficacy with children aged 10 and 11, finding that children who played the game were then able to use procedural abstraction in Scratch. The article then uses game analytics to explore why the game was effective and gives three recommendations for educational game design based on this research: using learning trajectories and restrictive success conditions to introduce complex content, increasing learner investment through customisable avatars and suggestions for improving the evaluations of educational games.
Highlights
This article describes the design and evaluation of a novel educational programming game, Pirate Plunder, to teach procedural abstraction to children
We aim to address this issue in future work by having participants use Scratch to produce projects using procedural abstraction after playing Pirate Plunder
We have addressed RQ2 by giving reasons why the game was effective
Summary
This article describes the design and evaluation of a novel educational programming game, Pirate Plunder, to teach procedural abstraction to children. Pirate Plunder aims to teach children to identify code duplication in Scratch projects and be able to remove this using procedural abstraction and code reuse. Despite these skills being an important part of computer science, children, those in primary education (age 5 to 11), are rarely taught them because of a lack of teacher expertise (Rich et al, 2019) and school resources (Larke, 2019). The article builds upon a previous report on the design of Pirate Plunder (Rose et al, 2018) by describing in more detail how the game introduces the learning content It provides a complete and final report of an extended evaluation described in Rose et al (2019). It includes a detailed description of the complete study (employing a crossover design) and a comprehensive discussion of the complete set of results and their implications
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