Abstract
Visual Programming Environments (VPEs) are predominantly being used to teach programming concepts through interactive games with interesting narratives. Games have been developed to teach basic concepts of programming such as deriving logic, writing code, debugging the code and so on. Debugging code is one of the most important activities that can improve the skill of tackling a problem. In programming, one needs to identify the correct location of an error and fix it, which is usually learned through experience. Games have been developed to teach debugging to novice programmers. Syntactical errors occur frequently in the early stages of programming. The existing debugging games aim to support users in debugging the logic of the problem, but do not target on correcting the code snippets based on syntax. To address this challenge of providing syntactical support, we propose a treasure hunt based debugging game, in which users pass through various levels of the game by debugging code snippets written in C language. We have evaluated G4D based on MEEGA+ model, with 20 volunteers, having different programming backgrounds. The results of the user survey indicate that G4D has a good quality level and about 75% of the volunteers have either strongly agreed or agreed to recommend G4D to their colleagues.
Highlights
Computers and computer based technologies are impacting a broad spectrum of our society
We have developed a prototype version of G4D, a treasure hunt based debugging game to support novice programmers in debugging a given code snippet
Conclusion and future work In this paper, we presented the prototype version of a treasure hunt game that can be played on personal computers of users
Summary
Computers and computer based technologies are impacting a broad spectrum of our society. For novice programmers, debugging starts from step 4, as the error would most likely be reported in the code by themselves, rather than testing teams, and Fig. 1 Design of G4D based on Cognitive Load Theory they might not have to track, reproduce the error or automate a test case. Moksha moves forward in the game, to find boxes, as shown in [B] of Fig. 5 that contain clues to debug the given code snippet She comes across alien enemy animals that are capable of attacking, which results in degradation of the player’s life. In course of the game, when Moksha finds a box, she breaks it with the provided weapon, to find clues that help in debugging the code snippet She finds the first clue to debug, which is displayed as shown in [A] of Scene 1 of Fig. 8.
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