DEVELOPING A GAME FOR UNDERGRADUATE CS STUDENTS TO LEARN DATA STRUCTURES

Abstract

This thesis highlights the difficulties that Computer Science (CS) students face when learning programming concepts, particularly data structures. The reasons behind these difficulties are manifold, including the complexity of programming concepts, a lack of understanding of programming concepts, high diversity in computational and programming abilities and aptitudes among students, and motivational issues. As shown by the literature, Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA) courses are among the most important concepts for undergraduate CS majors but tend to be difficult due to the inherent complexity and abstraction exhibited by the fundamental concepts. The Binary Search Tree is cited as one of
the most challenging data structures to learn.
To address the challenges faced by students, this research proposes the use of gamification in education, which involves incorporating game elements into non-game contexts. Gamification has been shown to be effective in increasing engagement, motivation, and learning in various fields, including CS education. This research proposes that a computer science concept, such as Binary Search Tree should be presented in a simplified and engaging way to improve student motivation and engagement, and gamification is a promising approach for achieving this.
The research highlights several existing gamifications for DSA topics, such as Cosmo Game, Sort Attack, One Up, and Into the Stack, but notes that most of these games lack personalization to meet the unique needs of individual students. To address this limitation, the research proposes a study to investigate how to develop a personalized game for learning Binary Search Trees by undergraduate CS students. The study follows a Design-Based Research approach (DBR), which involves identifying common problems and difficulties
faced by undergraduate CS students in learning Binary Search Trees, determining the design principles from related theories to underpin the game’s development, building the game from scratch, assessed by CS students, and evaluating its effectiveness in helping students learn Binary Search Trees.
The contribution of the study is a detailed implementation of a personalized game for learning Binary Search Trees that will provide both theoretical and practical insights into the benefits of gamification in CS education. The theoretical contributions include an overview of the challenges faced by students in learning DSA concepts, an exploration of the gamified elements that are most beneficial for students, and the design principles for developing the game built upon educational theories. The practical contribution are the
prototype and lessons on designing, implementing, and deploying such games that will be useful for CS teachers.

Date of Award	26 Feb 2024
Original language	English
Supervisor	Ebrahim Rahimi (Examiner) & Clara Maathuis (Co-assessor)