BOTS Player Authoring in Programming Games

Project Description

BOTS is a programming puzzle game designed to teach fundamental ideas of programming and problem-solving to novice computer users. The goal of the BOTS project is to investigate how to best use community-authored content within serious games and educational games. BOTS was inspired by games like LightBot and RoboRally, as well as the success of Scratch and it’s online community. In BOTS, players take on the role of programmers writing code to navigate a robot around a grid-based 3D environment

Project Details

• BOTS first explored the social aspects of a simple programming envionrment
• Research was conducted to determine user authoring filters for quality puzzles
• Later, we used Hint Factory to generate next steps hints by converting world states into parsable problem states

Publications

• Hicks, A. G. (2016). Design Tools and Data-Driven Methods to Facilitate Player Authoring in a Programming Puzzle Game.
• Hicks, D., Dong, Y., Zhi, R., & Barnes, T. (2015). Applying deep gamification principles to improve quality of user-designed levels. In Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Games+ Learning+ Society (GLS11).
• Hicks, A., Dong, Y., Zhi, R., Cateté, V., & Barnes, T. (2015, June). BOTS: Selecting Next-Steps from Player Traces in a Puzzle Game. In Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Graph-Based Educational Data Mining (G-EDM 2015).
• Hicks, A., Peddycord, B., & Barnes, T. (2014, June). Building games to learn from their players: Generating hints in a serious game. In International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (pp. 312-317). Springer, Cham.
• Hicks, A., Peddycord II, B., Rindos, I., & Simmons, C. (2014, March). A comparison of two approaches for hint generation in programming tutors. In Proceedings of the 45th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education (pp. 718-719). ACM.
• [Best Paper Nominee] Hicks, A., Cateté, V., & Barnes, T. (2014). Part of the game: Changing level creation to identify and filter low quality user-generated levels. In Proceedings of the international conference on the foundations of digital games. (FDG '12). (pp. 242-245). ACM.
• Peddycord III, B., Hicks, A., & Barnes, T. (2014, July). Generating hints for programming problems using intermediate output. In Educational Data Mining 2014.
• Hicks, A. (2013, July). Bots: Harnessing player data and player effort to create and evaluate levels in a serious game. In Educational Data Mining 2013.