University of Sussex
Browse

File(s) not publicly available

Young people's descriptions of computational rules in role-playing games: An empirical study

presentation
posted on 2023-06-07, 21:01 authored by Judith Good, Kate HowlandKate Howland, Keiron Nicholson
A study was carried out which examined the extent to which young people aged 11-12, with no prior instruction in programming, are able to write computational rules which govern play in a 3D computer role-playing game. Expressing these rules required the use of common computational structures such as conditionals, sets and loops. We analysed the rules written for their structure and style, and recorded the types of errors made. It was found that although young people were able to abstract away from the game play experience, very few of the rules were error-free. The most common errors were errors of omission (leaving elements out that should have been included) rather than errors of commission (including elements which should not be part of the rule). These findings have implications for the design of the Flip language, which aims to support young people as they begin to develop computational skills through game design.

History

Publication status

  • Published

ISSN

1943-6092

Pages

8.0

Presentation Type

  • paper

Event name

Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC 2010)

Event location

Leganes, Spain

Event type

conference

ISBN

978-1-4244-8485-0

Department affiliated with

  • Informatics Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2012-02-06

Usage metrics

    University of Sussex (Publications)

    Categories

    No categories selected

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC