A Mobile Game to Teach AVL Trees

Abstract

Data structures and algorithms represent an important area of computer science. Sometimes, however, they are too abstract for students to understand them only from the lecture. Therefore we were looking for a way how to explain at least some of them to students. In recent years, the use of digital games at all levels of education has come to the focus of researchers and educators. The advantage of this approach is, among others, learning in a natural and interesting way. Since there are still very few good-quality educational games, we have decided to design, implement and test our own mobile game for teaching the algorithm of inserting new nodes to an AVL tree. In this paper, we describe designing of the game as a learning tool and introduce the first results from testing the game in a university course.