A Game-Driven Approach to Teaching Bit Manipulation (Abstract Only).

The use of educational games to teach and reinforce concepts to students is an idea that has gained popularity in recent years. Games force students to demonstrate their mastery of a subject by applying its principles to complete a goal or solve a problem. Games also offer more frequent feedback on the student's performance along with immediate rewards. These factors can make games more engaging for the student than traditional homework or quizzes. In this poster, the authors present a program which hopes to leverage the advantages games have as a learning tool in order to help students understand the effects of bit manipulation. The player controls a factory with a series of pipes that dispense chocolate into trucks waiting below. Using bitwise operators, the player must manipulate which pipes are open and closed in order to ensure that a pipe is only open if there is a truck aligned beneath it. The player is offered immediate feedback on their performance in the form of empty trucks driving away or wasted chocolate splashing to the ground. Additional challenge can be added to the game by only allowing the player to adjust the pipes one time between each set of trucks. By providing immediate feedback and encouraging creative problem solving, this game may improve student's intuition about the mechanics underlying bit manipulation.