CTArcade: New approach to teaching CT via game playing

[bede...@gmail.com]

We have been developing a website for teaching CT by harnessing student's existing game playing skills. We  think that by providing scaffolding, we can help students express their tacit knowledge of how they play games - and that can be used to have a more explicit discussion about CT skills.

To that end, we have built a prototype website where participants can play an online Tic Tac Toe game against a virtual player that starts off very "stupid".  But as the (human) participant plays, they teach the virtual player why they played the way they did, and in doing so, the virtual player becomes more skilled. The goal is to create an excellent virtual player - and that virtual player can then play against other human participants' creations.

So, go ahead and give it a try. The code is open source, the system is publicly hosted, and there is a short video that shows how it works, along with a draft paper that explains the whole concept in more detail.  It is all available here:

http://ctarcade.appspot.com/

Project by students Tak Yeon Lee & Matt Mauriello, and faculty Ben Bederson and June Ahn

  - Ben

Prof. Ben Bederson

@bederson (twitter)

www.cs.umd.edu/~bederson

(301) 867-3838   

Human-Computer Interaction Lab

Computer Science Department

Institute for Advanced Computer Studies

iSchool

University of Maryland

College Park, MD 20742