Developing Educational 3D Games With StarLogo: The Role of Backwards Fading in the Transfer of Programming Experience


Boldbaatar N., Şendurur E.

JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL COMPUTING RESEARCH, cilt.57, sa.6, ss.1468-1494, 2019 (SSCI) identifier identifier

  • Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
  • Cilt numarası: 57 Sayı: 6
  • Basım Tarihi: 2019
  • Doi Numarası: 10.1177/0735633118806747
  • Dergi Adı: JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL COMPUTING RESEARCH
  • Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Scopus
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.1468-1494
  • Anahtar Kelimeler: programming and programming languages, teaching, learning strategies, backwards fading, completion example, worked example, efficient instruction, game development, game-based learning, block-based programming, text-based programming, ENVIRONMENT, EXAMPLES, SKILL
  • Ondokuz Mayıs Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

The emergence of block-based environments aims to facilitate the problems caused by the abstractness of text-based languages. Recent studies generally focus on the effect of having block-based experience on programming education. This study is an attempt to observe the transfer of previous programming experiences (block-based vs. text-based) into a three-dimensional game-making environment through the use of backwards fading. In addition to observation of transfer, students' perceptions about the difficulty of practices were also investigated. Twenty-one senior university students participated in the study. They practiced through worked example, completion example, and full practice. Moreover, the comparison of the contribution of three examples, their perceived difficulty, and cognitive load has also been observed. There are four main findings that add value to the current literature. First, students having text-based programming experience had higher scores, which may be a sign of far transfer; second, completion example format was more efficient for students having block-based programming experience; third, full practice format was perceived as more difficult than either worked example or completion example; and fourth, based on the efficiency of example formats, completion example represented high efficiency for all students. However, average efficiency of all example formats has represented high efficiency for students, who had text-based programming experience.