Designing a Programming Game to Improve Children’s Procedural Abstraction Skills in Scratch

The recent shift in compulsory education from ICT-focused computing curricula to informatics, digital literacy and computer science, has resulted in children being taught computing using block-based programming tools such as Scratch, with teaching that is often limited by school resources and teacher expertise. Even without these limitations, Scratch users often produce code with ‘code smells’ such as duplicate blocks and long scripts which impact how they understand and debug projects. These code smells can be removed using procedural abstraction, an important concept in computer science rarely taught to this age group. This article describes the design of a novel educational block-based programming game, Pirate Plunder, which concentrates on how procedural abstraction is introduced and reinforced. The article then reports an extended evaluation to measure the game’s efficacy with children aged 10 and 11, finding that children who played the game were then able to use procedural abstraction in Scratch. The article then uses game analytics to explore why the game was effective and gives three recommendations for educational game design based on this research: using learning trajectories and restrictive success conditions to introduce complex content, increasing learner investment through customisable avatars and suggestions for improving the evaluations of educational games.

Implementation issues of parallel shape grammars

Shape grammars come in a variety of forms. Algebras of shapes have been defined for spatial elements of different kinds, as well as for shapes augmented with varying attributes, allowing for grammar forms to be expressed in terms of a direct product of basic algebras. This algebraic approach is extended here to the algebraic derivation of combinations of basic shape algebras with attribute algebras. This algebraic abstraction at the same time serves as a procedural abstraction, giving insights into the modular implementation of a general shape grammar interpreter for different grammar forms. In addition, we consider practical limitations on algebraic compositions of basic shape algebras with attribute algebras and identify a complication with respect to solving the matching problem for parallel and compound shape grammars, suggesting a way to address this complication.

Design of Milk Packaging Line Based on FluidSIM-P

Pneumatic transmission system structure is complex and procedural abstraction. The system can also be difficult to test the intuitive way. Effective design and test means become one of important content in pneumatic system design. This paper introduces the FluidSIM software environment pneumatic transmission system design and simulation function and design milk packing line pressure drive system. It is proved that the system is feasible.