About:
Seyedeh Hasti Mousavi received her B.Sc. in Computer Engineering (Software) from Shariaty Technical College, Tehran, Iran, in 2011.
Thesis Abstract:
In the last decade, use of online education has grown significantly. The use of online programs provides a good opportunity for teachers to be able to offer their training in a new and higher quality context. Therefore, different online programs allow people with different conditions to learn new skills. One of the most important and widely used skills in various fields is programming. In addition, programming increases people’s problem-solving skills and critical thinking. One of the best teaching methods that focuses on problem-solving skills is puzzle learning. However, the process of learning programming is difficult for beginners due to lack of a coherent program skill, confusion in language, and great variety of concepts. This reduces the user’s motivation to continue learning. For this purpose, gamification is used to increase the user’s motivation and engage him in the learning process. Gamification is a technique that allows the game element to be used in a non-game context, in order to increase the motivation of users to achieve specific goals. However, developing an online programming learning system that can use gamification to motivate users and puzzle-based learning to increase productivity in beginner programming learning is a very difficult, time-consuming, and specialized task. The model-Driven approach reduces the complexities of development by increasing the level of abstraction and modeling of concepts defined in a specific domain. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to provide a model-driven framework for gamification of learning introductory programming and the production of applications for this purpose.
The proposed framework consists of three main components: a domain-specific modeling language, a graphical editor, and a transformation engine. After designing the model in the graphical editor and validating it, the final model is transformed into an engine and finally, the code of the gamified application is provided to the user. An online workshop was held to evaluate the framework. In this workshop, a case study for teaching Csharp programming in the tenth grade of the high school was provided to the evaluators. The case study is evaluated by the developer of the framework and workshop participants. During the workshop, the participants’ behavior was recorded and after modeling, a questionnaire was provided to measure the usability, utility, and user satisfaction of the framework. The results of the evaluations show that our proposed framework has made the software development process easier for beginners and greatly reduced the development time.
Papers in English