Gamification of Undergraduate Computer Science Data Structures

Computer Science contains many abstract concepts, which are both difficult to teach, and to comprehend. Many attempts have been made to help students learn these concepts through visualizations and various teaching techniques; however, these methods are mostly limited to the classroom and do not allow the student time to fully explore the concepts by themselves. By enabling students to interact with the material at their own pace, through an easily accessible and dynamic learning environment, students should be better able to retain and understand the concepts of Computer Science. Binary Search Tree (BST) is an abstract concept which can easily be converted into an interactive format suitable for student self-learning. To see whether an interactive format enhances students learning, a web-based prototype was created. The game consists of forming links between orbs, selecting orbs, copying orbs and removing orbs. This allows for all operations of Binary Search Trees to be explored while presenting the concept in a simple manner. As operations are preformed, and links are made, pseudocode is highlighted in the information menu as a way to reinforce learning and provide context to the operations. In order to measure the effectiveness of the prototype, a pre-survey and a post survey are integrated into the web application.