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ABSTRACT

Engaging students in rudimentary programming concepts is challenging when code examples do not yield practical payoff or are otherwise uninteresting. The purpose of Adventure RPG is to enable students to utilize first-semester object-oriented programming concepts to build a text adventure game. In this paper, we describe the incremental development and modular deployment that characterize the game's introduction into the course curriculum. In its earliest stages, the game welcomes players and asks them to select a lineage for their heroes. In its final stage, it is a fully functioning text adventure game utilizing selection statements, loops, methods, classes, objects, arrays, and file input/output. A survey of 60 students revealed that a majority of students scored the activity as highly valuable and self-reported high scores for positivity and participation in the Adventure RPG live-coding activities, while also reporting low levels of perceived distraction. The project provides ample opportunities for co-creation and incorporation of student-sourced enhancement ideas. Given the importance of live coding in delivering content in programming courses, this teaching tip provides student-supported content to refresh instructors' live coding exercises and enhance curriculum in introductory Java programming courses.

Keywords: Computer programming, Teaching tip, Code demonstrations, Computing curriculum

1. INTRODUCTION

An introductory programming course is one of the fundamentals of an information systems education. Despite its importance, these courses are often regarded as overly complex and disengaging. In fact, many students in information technology (IT) related majors find introductory programming courses difficult (Ali & Smith, 2014). Furthermore, many students find traditional programming courses to be dull (Lippert & Granger, 1997). Successfully learning to code requires students to fully grasp and apply the concepts to the correct contexts. Traditional education methods, such as slide decks, are generally discouraged in programming pedagogy as they promote a passive approach to learning (Ferreira et al., 2018). Live coding has emerged among the leading strategies for content delivery in programming courses (Selvaraj et al., 2021). In particular, incremental exercises spread over longer time horizons allow students to easily retain information while also being able to go back and refine the work they have previously done (González-Pérez & Ramirez-Montoya, 2022). When students are directly involved in the development of digital assets that represent a complete unit of learning, or learning object, their education...

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