Document Type

Article

Publication Date

6-2017

Keywords

play-based teaching, teaching, student, engagement, computing, active learning, Jenga

Abstract

The research work in this paper investigates a new teaching strategy that uses active learning through play to increase students’ uptake of learning computing concepts. The strategy promotes student engagement through playing a customized Jenga game. The game consists of a set of blocks, one side of each block is covered with a piece of dry-erase tape to allow erasing and writing on the blocks. This allows instructors to reuse this editable Jenga for developing their own game-based learning activities. The editable Jenga can be used without writing if needed. Three sample activities with writing have been developed and conducted to test the strategy experimentally in addition to a fourth activity without writing any terms on the Jenga blocks. The test results showed that the strategy improves the class average and promotes the student engagement. A survey has been conducted to get students’ feedback on the strategy. The survey results demonstrated that students like the play-based strategy. The contribution of this paper is the development of a teaching strategy that improves students’ engagement which in turn helps students to learn important computing concepts.

Faculty

Faculty of Applied Science and Technology (FAST)

Journal

International Journal of Digital Society

Version

Publisher's version

Peer Reviewed/Refereed Publication

yes

Terms of Use

Terms of Use for Works posted in SOURCE.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Original Publication Citation

Mahmoud, E. S. (2017). An engagement strategy for teaching computing concepts. International Journal of Digital Society, 8(2), 1288-1295.

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