A multiplayer online game for teaching software engineering practices

Abstract

Programming best-practices are a difficult subject to learn for beginner computer science students. In the classroom, these practices are appreciated and taught through a combination of lectures and group projects. Group projects, however, take time and are ill-suited for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). This project aims to develop a web-based many-player programming game which addresses these issues by having large numbers of students code many small functions in parallel, give feedback on each other's implementations, and compose them into much larger programs. Gameplay will require only a few hours and should provide rapid and substantive feedback on the reusability and flexibility of a student's code. We have developed and playtested a small-scale prototype to determine if software engineering lessons could be learned through such a game. Further prototypes will test the game at MOOC scales and with different structures. We will develop a final version to deploy to MIT's online class 6.005x: Software Construction.