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An Investigation of Educational Video Games for Computer Science Education University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Computer Science and Engineering: Theses, Computer Science and Engineering, Department Dissertations, and Student Research of 12-2020 Packet Delivery: An Investigation of Educational Video Games for Computer Science Education Robert Lafferty University of Nebraska-Lincoln, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/computerscidiss Part of the Computer Sciences Commons Lafferty, Robert, "Packet Delivery: An Investigation of Educational Video Games for Computer Science Education" (2020). Computer Science and Engineering: Theses, Dissertations, and Student Research. 203. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/computerscidiss/203 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Computer Science and Engineering, Department of at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Computer Science and Engineering: Theses, Dissertations, and Student Research by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. PACKET DELIVERY: AN INVESTIGATION OF EDUCATIONAL VIDEO GAMES FOR COMPUTER SCIENCE EDUCATION by Robert Casey Lafferty A THESIS Presented to the Faculty of The Graduate College at the University of Nebraska In Partial Fulfilment of Requirements For the Degree of Master of Science Major: Computer Science Under the Supervision of Professor Shruti Bolman Lincoln, Nebraska December, 2020 PACKET DELIVERY: AN INVESTIGATION OF EDUCATIONAL VIDEO GAMES FOR COMPUTER SCIENCE EDUCATION Robert Casey Lafferty, M. S. University of Nebraska, 2020 Adviser: Shruti Bolman The field of educational video games has rapidly grown since the 1970s, mostly producing video games to teach core education concepts such as mathematics, natural science, and English. Recently, various research groups have developed educational games to address elective topics such as finance and health. Educational video games often target grade school audiences and rarely target high school students, college students, or adults. Computer science topics are not a common theme among educa- tional video games; the games that address Computer Science topics teach computer fundamentals, such as typing or basic programming, to young audiences. Packet Delivery, an educational video game for introductory computer science students, is an investigation into the use of apprenticeship learning, constructivism, and scaffolding learning paradigms to teach the Domain Name System (DNS) lookup process. In Packet Delivery, the player's primary task is delivering letters without addresses to recipients via a search mechanism that emulates the DNS lookup process. Through practice and in-game upgrades, the player's goal is to learn the basics of DNS lookup and its optimizations. To analyze comprehension and retention of students playing Packet Delivery, a study containing three tests were given to participants over the course of a few weeks; a pretest gauging prior knowledge, a post-test gauging immediate comprehension, and a follow-up post-test gauging retention. The study provided a proof of concept that educational video games not only have a significant place in higher education , but that apprenticeship learning, constructivism, and scaffolding are highly effective learning paradigms for use within educational video games. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my adviser, Dr. Shruti Bolman, as well as Dr. Mohammad Hasan and Dr. Peter Revesz for all their guidance as my committee. I would also like to thank Reggie Bolman for his guidance in writing my thesis. I'd like to give a special thank you to Molly Lee, Alan Mason, Matt Rodriguez, Justin Ayers, Russ Feldhausen, Ian Meister, Alisa Khieu, Nate Hendrickson, Laura Lafferty, Austin Lafferty, and Reggie Bolman for their help in refining Packet Delivery to its current state. Lastly, I'd like to thank Dr. Shruti Bolman, Reggie Bolman, Dr. Chris Bourke, and Quinn Lanik for allowing me to conduct a study with their courses in cooperation with this thesis. v Contents Contentsv List of Figures vii List of Tables ix 1 Introduction1 2 Background4 2.1 DNS Lookup ............................... 5 2.2 Video Game Development Cycle..................... 7 2.3 Bloom's Taxonomy............................ 9 2.4 Pedagogical Frameworks......................... 11 3 Related Work 13 3.1 Bloom's Taxonomy............................ 14 3.2 Pedagogical Frameworks......................... 15 3.3 Video Games in Education........................ 17 4 Educational Game Approach 20 4.1 Game Map Design and Gamification .................. 26 vi 4.2 Request Detail Manifestation ...................... 28 4.3 Learning Objectives............................ 30 4.4 Learning Comprehension Devices .................... 33 5 Packet Delivery Implementation 37 5.1 Game Map................................. 38 5.2 Game Architecture............................ 39 5.3 User Interface Architecture........................ 42 6 Experimental Methods 45 6.1 Questionnaires .............................. 46 6.2 Analysis Procedure............................ 47 7 Results 50 7.1 Questionnaire Responses......................... 50 7.2 Comparing Demographics ........................ 51 7.3 Qualitative Responses .......................... 61 8 Conclusions 63 9 Future Work 65 A Informed Consent Text 68 B Screening Survey Questions 71 C Pre-test and Post-test Questions 77 D Packet Delivery Source Code 86 Bibliography 219 vii List of Figures 2.1 Forward DNS Lookup Structure....................... 6 2.2 The tiers of the revised Bloom's Taxonomy [4]............... 10 4.1 Overview of Packet Delivery Game Map.................. 27 4.2 Overview of Packet Delivery COM Hills Neighborhood.......... 27 4.3 Example of a letter in Packet Delivery ................... 29 4.4 Packet Delivery's Address Book Before the \Exit the Matrix" Upgrade . 34 4.5 Packet Delivery's Task Tracker Before (Left) and After (Right) the \Exit the Matrix" Upgrade............................. 35 4.6 Packet Delivery Credit Scene ........................ 36 5.1 Packet Delivery Game Map and Neighborhood Screenshots . 38 5.2 Packet Delivery Logistics & Upgrades Screen ............... 39 5.3 UML Diagram for Upgrades and Related Classes ............. 39 5.4 Packet Delivery Lessons Screenshots .................... 43 7.1 Violin plot showing the distribution of student scores across all compre- hension and retention tests.......................... 52 7.2 Bar Graph Showing Gender Distribution of Packet Delivery Participants 54 7.3 Box and Whisker Plot Gender vs Test Score for Packet Delivery Participants 55 viii 7.4 Box plot showing the distribution of student scores across all tests grouped by gender ................................... 55 7.5 Participants' year in school as collected in the demographics portion of the pre-test .................................. 57 7.6 Number of study of participants with prior experience playing video games 58 7.7 Self-reported hours per week in which participants play video games in their spare time................................ 59 7.8 Interaction effect of gaming experience and study stage.......... 60 ix List of Tables 4.1 Lookup Agency Roles ............................ 28 4.2 Gameplay Upgrade Details.......................... 33 6.1 revised Bloom's Taxonomy Question Distribution............. 47 7.1 Number of correct responses per questionnaire. .............. 53 7.2 List of all participant majors......................... 56 7.3 List of Programming Languages Previously Known to Packet Delivery Participants.................................. 56 1 Chapter 1 Introduction Educational video games have become increasingly popular over the last fifty years in both classroom learning and commercial games such as Jumpstart Kids and Ore- gon Trail. While most educational games target grade school audiences and focus on teaching core concepts such as mathematics and English, some recently developed video games target elective subjects such as health and finance. However, within the industry, there exist few educational video games which focus on presenting com- puter science topics; educational video games which did present computer science topics were primarily targeted towards young audiences and only taught typing or introductory programming. The work in this thesis novelly presents a computer science educational video game to college students, wherein the effectiveness of such a medium is measured using surveyed statistical analysis. This thesis applied the apprenticeship learning paradigm and abstraction refinement to create Packet Delivery, an educational video game designed to teach Domain Name System (DNS) lookup to introductory computer science college students. In Packet Delivery, the player's task was to deliver letters without addresses using a two-layer lookup system that emulates the DNS lookup 2 process. Through practice and in-game upgrades, the player learned the basics of DNS lookup and its optimizations. Utilizing apprenticeship learning, constructivism, and scaffolding, Packet Delivery teaches the DNS lookup process in an efficient manner by presenting a set of tasks to the player and encouraging an interactive learning environment in which the player gradually develops the confidence to complete the given tasks without guidance [11]. Utilizing a postal service analogy, the player begins Packet Delivery by imitating the duties of a postal service worker and, from contextual details presented through this scenario,
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