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. Three sample activities have been developed and conducted to test the strategy experimentally. 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.

Published in: Canada International Conference on Education, 2017

• Date of Conference: 26-29 June, 2017
• DOI: 10.2053/CICE.2017.0151
• Electronic ISBN: 978-1-908320-83-4
• Conference Location: University of Toronto Mississauga, Canada