If Memory Serves: A Game to Supplement the Instruction of Concepts Related to Pointers
Pages 241 - 242
Abstract
In this Tips, Techniques, and Courseware presentation, we will provide an overview of If Memory Serves, a game designed to complement the instruction of pointers in computer science courses. The game was first designed during a working group in ITiCSE 2017 as a tool to enable deeper understanding of pointers due to the difficulties students often face when learning about them. Over the last two years, the game has continued to evolve and has moved from a concept of the game to near-alpha. During this talk, we will demonstrate the game, provide insight into why it was developed, and discuss how it can be used to teach pointers. We will also briefly discuss our concept behind this open-source game and invite feedback from the audience as well as invite others to remix, test, and engage in research on testing the game's effectiveness.
References
[1]
Bruce Adcock, Paolo Bucci, Wayne D. Heym, Joseph E. Hollingsworth, Timothy Long, and Bruce W. Weide. 2007. Which Pointer Errors Do Students Make?. In Proceedings of the 38th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE '07). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 9--13.
[2]
Anthony Allevato, Stephen H. Edwards, and Manuel A. Pérez-Qui nones. 2009. Dereferee: Exploring Pointer Mismanagement in Student Code. In Proceedings of the 40th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE '09). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 173--177.
[3]
Jonas Boustedt, Anna Eckerdal, Robert McCartney, Jan Erik Moström, Mark Ratcliffe, Kate Sanders, and Carol Zander. 2007. Threshold Concepts in Computer Science: Do They Exist and Are They Useful?. In Proceedings of the 38th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE '07). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 504--508.
[4]
Michelle Craig and Andrew Petersen. 2016. Student Difficulties with Pointer Concepts in C. In Proceedings of the Australasian Computer Science Week Multiconference (ACSW '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 8, bibinfonumpages10 pages.
[5]
Chris Johnson, Monica McGill, Durell Bouchard, Michael K Bradshaw, V'ictor A Bucheli, Laurence D Merkle, Michael James Scott, Z Sweedyk, J Ángel, Zhiping Xiao, et almbox. 2016. Game development for computer science education. In Proceedings of the 2016 ITiCSE Working Group Reports. ACM, 23--44.
[6]
Monica M. McGill, Chris Johnson, James Atlas, Durell Bouchard, Chris Messom, Ian Pollock, and Michael James Scott. 2017. If Memory Serves: Towards Designing and Evaluating a Game for Teaching Pointers to Undergraduate Students. In Proceedings of the 2017 ITiCSE Conference on Working Group Reports (ITiCSE-WGR '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 25--46.
Index Terms
- If Memory Serves: A Game to Supplement the Instruction of Concepts Related to Pointers
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Information
Published In
July 2019
583 pages
ISBN:9781450368957
DOI:10.1145/3304221
- General Chairs:
- Bruce Scharlau,
- Roger McDermott,
- Program Chairs:
- Arnold Pears,
- Mihaela Sabin
Copyright © 2019 Owner/Author.
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Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
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Published: 02 July 2019
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ITiCSE '19
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ITiCSE '19: Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education
July 15 - 17, 2019
Aberdeen, Scotland Uk
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