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First year computer science courses are typically taught by introducing students to different programming concepts and having students practice new concepts by writing source code (programs). This approach can be challenging for students with little or no programming experience and often de-emphasizes two important aspects of computer programming:

Program understanding or comprehension – Do students understand the programs that they write? Program debugging – Are students able to find and fix problems (bugs) in their programs? Novice programmers who seek to write reliable, high quality source code need to be able to understanding their programs as well as efficiently identify and repair bugs. The process of identifying bugs, known as debugging, has been shown to take up to 50% of the time of a large software project and is considered an essential skill. Furthermore, the ability to debug source code is not easily acquired. Introductory programming courses often do not focus extensively on helping students learn to debug, and anecdotally we have observed that the frustration experienced when debugging contributes to student withdrawals from these courses. Compounding this challenge is that the proliferation of computer programming is leading to more programs requiring at least one introductory course and more students, who have no previous programming experience, enrolling into larger classes.

In order to help novice programming students develop program understanding and debugging skills, we have developed two educational games called RobotON! and RoboBUG. These games are intended to be used as supplemental educational tools for first year students. RobotON! addresses the need for students to learn programming understanding and comprehension skills by testing their knowledge of example programs’ behaviors and purposes. RoboBUG focuses on utilizing debugging techniques to fix source code inside the. Both games are designed to be extendable and allow instructors to add their own levels.

If you want to try out the game, goto this link: http://sqrlab2.science.uoit.ca:8081/RoboDemo/