A Mobile Device Based Serious Gaming Approach for Teaching and Learning Java Programming

Most first year computer science students find that learning object-oriented programming is hard. Serious games have ever been used as one approach to handle this problem. But most of them cannot be played with mobile devices. This obviously does not suit the era of mobile computing that intends to allow students to learn programming skills in anytime anywhere. To enhance mobile teaching and learning, a research project started over a year ago and aims to create a mobile device based serious gaming approach along with a serious game for enhancing mobile teaching and learning for Java programming. So far the project has completed a literature review for understanding existing work and identifying problems in this area, conducted a survey for eliciting students’ requirements for mobile gaming approach, and then established a mobile-device based serious gaming approach with a developed prototype of the game. This paper introduces the project in details, and in particularly presents and discusses its current results. It is expected that the presented project will be helpful and useful to bring more efficient approaches with new mobile games into teaching object-oriented programming and to enhance students’ learning experiences.