CHESE 2016 - 2nd International Code Hunt Workshop on Educational Software Engineering (CHESE)

Two of the backbones of software engineering are programming and testing. Both of these require many hours of practice to acquire mastery. To encourage students to put in these hours of practice, educators often employ the element of fun. Generally, this involves setting engaging assignments which emphasize the visual, audio, mobile and social world in which the students now live. However, a common complaint in second or third year is that “students can’t program” which is usually interpreted as meaning they are not able to produce code readily for fundamental algorithms such as read a file or search a list. Recruiters in industry are famous for requiring applicants to write such code on the spot. Thus there is a dichotomy: how to maintain the self-motivation of students to practice coding skills, and at the same time focus on core algorithmic problems.
An answer is to use the challenge of a game. Games are everywhere these days, and the motivation to score, do better and complete the game is very high. We are familiar with the concept of playing against the computer, and the sense of achievement that is acquired when goals are reached or one wins. Winning is fun, and fun is seen as a vital ingredient in accelerating learning and retaining interest in what might be a long and sometimes boring journey towards obtaining a necessary skill.
The aim of the workshop is to act not only as a forum for the exchange of ideas, but also as a vehicle to stimulate, deepen, and widen partnership between software engineering and education fields internationally.
The workshop will pay special attention to the open source Code Hunt data (players’ playing history) released by Microsoft Research.
Call for Submissions
Focus
This workshop is intended to build up a specific part of the research community of educational software engineering around testing using gaming. Code Hunt is the most available tool for this research, but papers addressing other platforms, systems and tools are also welcome. Topics include, but are not limited to:
theory and practice of testing in education
the relationship between testing and gaming
approaches to providing hints
analysis and visualization of student data
challenges of sharing and re-using data
challenges provided by different programming languages
experience reports on playing Code Hunt games
constructing and analyzing Code Hunt games
challenges of white box testing.