Many people are learning programming on their own using various online resources such as educational games. Unfortunately, little is known about how to keep online educational game learners motivated throughout their game play, especially if they become disengaged or frustrated with their task. Keeping online learners engaged is essential for learning programming, as it may have lasting effects on their views and self-efficacy towards computer science. To address this issue, we created a coarse-grained frustration detector that provided users with customized, adaptive feedback to help (re)engage them with the game content. We ran a controlled experiment with 400 participants over the course of 1.5 months, with half of the players playing the original game, and the other half playing the game with the frustration detection and adaptive feed- back. We found that the users who received the adaptive feedback when frustrated completed more levels than their counterparts who did not receive this customized feedback. Based on these findings, we believe that adaptive feedback is essential in keeping educational game learners engaged, and propose future work for researchers and designers of online educational games to better support their users.
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Autonomy-Supportive Game Benefits Both Inexperienced and Experienced Programmers
As more people turn to discretionary online tools to learn new skills such as computer programming, exploring how to better support a wide range of learners is becoming increasingly essential to train the next generation of highly skilled technology workers. In our prior work, users with high learner autonomy complained that most online resources they used to learn more programming did not provide them with the flexibility they preferred to navigate through learning materials, locking them into a set sequence of topics/concepts. To explore this, we implemented a level-jumping feature into an online educational programming game. We tested it with 350 new users, tracking their progress through the game for 7 days each. We found that those with high learner autonomy did use the level jumping feature more than those with low learner autonomy. We also found that males were more likely to use this new feature, regardless of learner autonomy level, compared to their female counterparts. Finally, we found that those with low learner autonomy ultimately completed more levels than their high autonomy counterparts, and that this was particularly true of female learners (who completed the most levels overall). Based on these findings, we believe that autonomous-supportive features such as flexible navigation may be beneficial to all users of online educational tools, and that encouraging its use by a wider group of users (particularly females), may increase positive effects.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1837489
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10332897
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of computing sciences in colleges
- Volume:
- 37
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 1937-4771
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 89-97
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/doi/abs/10.5555/3503984.3503993
