MazeStar: platform for studying virtual identity and computer science education
Author(s)
Kao, Dominic; Harrell, D. Fox
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This paper presents an overview of the MazeStar platform for Computer Science education. MazeStar is both a game (Mazzy) that teaches programming concepts like loops and conditionals, and a game editor which allows players to create and share their own game levels. By playing and creating, players are using computing concepts (e.g., block structuring, parallelism, etc.) and computing practices (e.g., debugging, iterative prototyping, etc.). To date the MazeStar platform has been used in controlled user studies involving > 10,000 participants. Here, our goal is to detail the different components of the MazeStar platform, and how we have/are leveraging these components to study the interplay of education, games/game-making, and virtual identity.
Date issued
2017-08Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer ScienceJournal
Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games
Publisher
ACM Press
Citation
Kao, Dominic and D. Fox Harrell. "MazeStar: a platform for studying virtual identity and computer science education." Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, August 2017, New York, NY, USA, ACM Press, August 2017. © 2017 The Authors
Version: Author's final manuscript
ISBN
9781450353199