OASIcs.SLATE.2018.9.pdf
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Asura: A Game-Based Assessment Environment for Mooshak (Short Paper)
Authors
José Carlos Paiva 
,
José Paulo Leal
-
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Volume:
7th Symposium on Languages, Applications and Technologies (SLATE 2018)
Series: Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs)
Conference: Symposium on Languages, Applications and Technologies (SLATE) - License:
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license
- Publication Date: 2018-07-13
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José Carlos Paiva and José Paulo Leal. Asura: A Game-Based Assessment Environment for Mooshak (Short Paper). In 7th Symposium on Languages, Applications and Technologies (SLATE 2018). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 62, pp. 9:1-9:9, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2018)
https://doi.org/10.4230/OASIcs.SLATE.2018.9
Abstract
Learning to program is hard. Students need to remain motivated to keep practicing and to overcome their difficulties. Several approaches have been proposed to foster students' motivation. As most people enjoy playing games of some kind and play on a regular basis, the use of games is one of the most widely spread approaches. However, taking full advantage of games to teach specific concepts of programming requires much effort. This paper presents Asura, a game-based assessment environment built on top of Mooshak that challenges students to code Software Agents (SAs) to play a game, allowing them to test the SAs against each others' SAs and watch a movie of the test. Once the challenge development stage ends, teachers are able to organize game-like tournaments among SAs. One of the key features of Asura is that it provides a means to reduce the required effort of building game-based challenges up to that of creating traditional programming exercises.
Subject Classification
ACM Subject Classification
- Applied computing → Interactive learning environments
- Social and professional topics → Computational science and engineering education
Keywords
- games
- programming
- learning
- graphical feedback
- tournament
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