Adrienne Decker
Elizabeth Lane Lawley
ABSTRACT
There is little argument that creating experiences for students that will increase student success and retention is a goal that is shared by anyone teaching courses. In computing courses, we have seen a lot of focused attention on the first year introductory courses as it has been shown that it is failure in these courses that drives students away from the discipline. In this paper we describe success we have had with first year students through the creation of achievement system for the undergraduate experience. Through the Just Press Play project and its associated achievements, we observed a significant shift in student behavior in relation to our first year students which lead to a greater level of student success in their first course.
- Alice website. Retrieved September 5, 2012 from http://www.alice.orgGoogle Scholar
- BlueJ website. Retrieved September 5, 2012 from http://www.bluej.orgGoogle Scholar
- Bogost, I. 2011. Gamification is Bullshit. Retrieved September 5, 2012 from http://www.bogost.com/blog/gamification_is_bullshit.shtmlGoogle Scholar
- Cheston, D. 2012. College as a Video Game? The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. Retrieved September 5, 2012 http://www.popecenter.org/commentaries/article.html?id=2726Google Scholar
- Cowden, D., et al. 2012. A C-based introductory course using robots. In Proceedings of the 43rd ACM technical symposium on Computer Science Education (Raleigh, NC, USA, February 29--March 3, 2012). SIGCSE '12. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 27--32. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Davies, H. 2007. Place as media in pervasive games. Proceedings of the 4th Australasian conference on Interactive entertainment (2007), 1--4. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Deci, E. L. and Ryan, R. 2002. The handbook of self-determination research. University of Rochester Press, Rochester, NY.Google Scholar
- Deterding, S. 2011. Gamification by Design: Response to O'Reilly. Gamification Research Network. Retrieved September 5, 2012 from http://gamification-research.org/2011/09/gamification-by-design-response-to-oreilly/Google Scholar
- Deterding, S. 2012. Gamification: designing for motivation. interactions. 19, 4 (Jul. 2012), 14--17. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Deterding, S. et al. 2011. Gamification. using game-design elements in non-gaming contexts. In Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (2011), 2425--2428. Google ScholarDigital Library
- D'Souza, D. et al. 2008. Transforming learning of programming: a mentoring project. In Proceedings of Tenth Australasian Computing Education Conference (Wollongong, Australia, January 2008). ACE2008. 75--84. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Greenberg, I., Kumar, D. and Xu, D. 2012. Creative coding and visual portfolios for CS1. In Proceedings of the 43rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (Raleigh, NC, USA, February 29--March 3, 2012). SIGCSE '12. ACM. New York, NY, 247--252. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Guzdial, M. et al. 2010. Variations on a theme: role of media in motivating computing education. Proceedings of the 41st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (Milwaukee, WI, USA, March 10--13, 2010). SIGCSE '10. ACM. New York, NY, 66--67. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Lawley, E. 2012. Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes: Revising the JPP User Experience. Retrieved September 6, 2012 from http://games.rit.edu/~thinkplay/2012/07/ch-ch-ch-ch-changes-revising-the-jpp-user-experience/Google Scholar
- Martin, F. 2012. Will massive open online courses change how we teach?. Commun. ACM 55, 8 (August 2012), 26--28. Google ScholarDigital Library
- McDowell, C. et al. 2006. Pair programming improves student retention, confidence, and program quality. Commun. ACM 49, 8 (August 2006), 90--95. Google ScholarDigital Library
- McGonigal, J. 2011. Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. Penguin Press. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Miller, A. and Kay, J. A mentor program in CS1. In Proceedings of ITiCSE 2002 (Aarhus, Denmark, June 24--26, 2002). ITiCSE '02. ACM. New York, NY, 9--13. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Montola, M. et al. 2009. Pervasive games: Theory and design. Morgan Kaufmann. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Nagappan, N. et al. 2003. Improving the CS1 experience with pair programming. In Proceedings of the 34th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (Reno, Nevada, USA, February 19--23, 2003). SIGCSE '03. ACM. New York, NY, 359--362. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Reges, S. 2006. Back to basics in CS1 and CS2. In Proceedings of the 37th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (Houston, Texas, USA, March 1--5, 2006). SIGCSE '06. ACM. New York, NY, 293--297. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Topping, K.J. 1996. The effectiveness of peer tutoring in further and higher education: A typology and review of the literature. Higher education. 32, 3 (1996), 321--345.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Life's a game and the game of life: how making a game out of it can change student behavior
Recommendations
Mentoring Student Teaching Assistants for Computer Science (Abstract Only)
SIGCSE '16: Proceedings of the 47th ACM Technical Symposium on Computing Science EducationInstitutions small and large often use student teaching assistants (TAs) to provide office hours, tutor students, and grade student work, and the quality of a course's TAs can greatly affect the quality of the course. In this BOF we will discuss the ...
The Computing Alliance of Hispanic-Serving Institutions: Supporting Hispanics at Critical Transition Points
Hispanics have the highest growth rates among all groups in the U.S., yet they remain considerably underrepresented in computing careers and in the numbers who obtain advanced degrees. Hispanics constituted about 7% of undergraduate computer science and ...
Life after tenure: professional development strategies for mid-career faculty
ASIST '16: Proceedings of the 79th ASIS&T Annual Meeting: Creating Knowledge, Enhancing Lives through Information & TechnologyMany publications, institutional policies, and resources focus on the professional development of doctoral students and junior faculty while professional development needs and resources available to mid-career faculty receive limited attention. The ...
Comments