Stelios Xinogalos

University of Macedonia | UOM · Department of Applied Informatics

Teaching and learning programming, and especially Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), is a compli-cated and challenging task. Students have to comprehend various OOP concepts and utilize them for designing object-oriented programs. Various types of educational programming environments, such as microworlds and educational games, have been devised for...

This article presents a comparative analysis of four low or no-code location-based game (LBG) authoring tools, namely Taleblazer, Aris, Actionbound, and Locatify. Each tool is examined in detail, with an emphasis on the functions and capabilities it provides for the development of LBGs. The article builds on the history and purpose of LBGs, their c...

Serious games are games that have a “serious� purpose besides entertainment [...]

Artificial Intelligence (AI) nowadays is the technology of the future, as its applications are constantly expanding in every aspect of human life. The spread of the internet has given a great impetus to technologies that apply AI algorithms and make their presence more and more intense in everyday life. However, despite the ubiquitous presence of A...

This paper reviews the research on adaptive serious games for programming regarding the implementation of their support systems. Serious games are designed to educate players in an entertaining and engaging manner. A key element in terms of meeting their educational goals is the presentation of the learning content through a support system. Recent...

Serious games (SGs) about Chemistry have the potential to cope with challenges, such as students’ low performance and lack of motivation for the subject. However, the majority of existing SGs for Chemistry have the form of educational applications infused with some elements of entertaining games. The aim of the study presented was to design and eva...

Serious games are a growing field in academic research and they are considered an effective tool for education. Game-based learning invokes motivation and engagement in students resulting in effective instructional outcomes. An essential aspect of a serious game is the method of support for presenting the teaching material and providing feedback. A...

This paper presents the design, deployment and evaluation of an undergraduate course on the Didactics of Informatics. The course was designed taking into account relevant literature and aims at preparing undergraduate students of Informatics for teaching the subject at schools. Specifically, the course aims at educating students, who are potential...

Teaching and learning theoretical subjects, such as History, although important, is considered by many students to be non-appealing. Alternative teaching approaches include the use of educational games and augmented reality (AR) applications, or more recently, AR educational games. Such games are considered to increase students’ interest for the su...

There is an increased interest in serious games about programming, particularly for younger ages. The ability to evoke motivation and retain engagement leads to better learning efficiency and a positive educational impact. Serious games usually include support systems to assist novice users. In recent years there have been attempts to enhance suppo...

This paper presents a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of fifty-seven studies on Distributed Pair Programming (DPP) in higher education, identifying which studies investigated factors on the effectiveness of DPP as a method for learning programming, factors related to mediating and stimulating interactions between students, the measures/instrumen...

Serious games, or more specifically educational games, are considered to be suitable to motivate and engage users in learning through playing. Serious games take advantage of successful game mechanics used in entertainment games in order to engage players in learning cognitively demanding subjects, such as computer programming. Several games for co...

Educational games have attracted the interest of instructors and researchers in various fields of knowledge since they seem to motivate students, engage them in the educational process, and improve their performance. Computer programming is, without a doubt, cognitively demanding, and this has resulted in extended utilization of educational games....

Creating video games can be a very complex process, which requires taking into account various hardware and software limitations. This process is even more complex for mobile games, which are limited to the resources that their platforms (mobile devices) offer in comparison to game consoles and personal computers. This restriction makes performance...

Serious games are considered an effective method to engage students in programming education and have been increasingly used in classrooms. An important part of the learning process with serious games involves the presentation of the new concepts and the provided support to encounter student difficulties. Although the most common approach is the us...

In recent years, several educational games for learning programming have been developed with promising results. The main purpose of this chapter is to present 22 educational games or platforms that aim to cultivate computational thinking through teaching computer programming concepts to primary school students. A short description of each game foll...

This is My Story� is a two-dimensional video game, aimed to assist students and young adults with intellectual disabilities (ID) and/or autism spectrum disorder (ASD) improve independent living skills. The main goal of the game is to serve as a means to enhance the learning process of skills related to independent living, in Special Education (SE)...

Serious games, or else educational games, for programming are considered to have a positive impact on learning programming. Specifically, serious games are considered to motivate students and engage them in playing and learning programming. However, more research is required in order to study their effects in learning programming, as well as their...

Online learning has attracted the interest of researchers and practitioners for decades. Various advantages, challenges and factors affecting the effectiveness of online learning have been reported. However, these findings have been recorded under ideal circumstances and not extraordinary situations, such as the one imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic...

Greenfoot is an educational programming environment that aims to motivate students in learning object-oriented programming (OOP) through the development of simple games and simulations. Several studies have presented positive results regarding the usage of Greenfoot as a tool for introducing novices to OOP. In this article, we propose using Greenfo...

Programming is considered by many a core skill of the 21st century. Learning the fundamentals of coding or programming encourages children to acquire new skills, such as problem solving, logical thinking, critical thinking, and Computational Thinking (CT), and moreover to be active creators of tomorrow. There are various platforms for learning codi...

There has been an active movement towards fun learning, using games in education. This article introduces the text-based serious game “Rise of the Java Emperor� that aims to support students in learning basic object-oriented programming concepts using Java. Information concerning the analysis, the design and the pilot evaluation of the game is pres...

Pair Programming (PP) has a long history, both in education and the software industry. More recently, specially designed environments have made the application of Distributed Pair Programming (DPP) possible, as well. In the context of an undergraduate Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) course, DPP has been applied for 5 years. Specifically, we have...

In this paper, a new serious game (SG) called Office Madness, is presented. The game is about learning basic and advanced concepts of the programming language C++. Its design was carried out using the EFM design model, while its pilot evaluation was carried out using the MEEGA evaluation model. The main goal of the game is to introduce users to the...

At 21st century Computational Thinking (CT) is considered a fundamental skill that anyone should possess and develop from a young age. Serious games and more specifically educational games (EGs) are a promising means of introducing algorithmic thinking and programming concepts and engaging students through the process of learning. In this article,...

The extended usage of mobile digital devices has nowadays become commonplace. Location-based games make the most of the mobile technologies by being played solely on mobile devices. The ever-growing interest for this type of applications goes beyond the mere goal of player entertainment, even reaching to the advocacy of civilization, research and e...

Serious games or educational games have attracted the interest of instructors and researchers for several years. In the field of education, serious games are being used for motivating students, attracting their interest in cognitively demanding fields and making the teaching and learning process more fun. Moreover, learning through implementing gam...

Designing serious games (SGs) for people with intellectual disability (ID) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD), requires proper planning and decision making. In this article, a proposal of a serious games design framework (GDF) that aims to assist designers and special education teachers and professionals develop successful SGs for people with ID an...

In recent years several educational games for learning programming have been developed with promising results. The main purpose of this chapter is to present twenty two educational games or platforms that aim to cultivate Computational Thinking through teaching computer programming concepts to primary school students. A short description of each ga...

Serious Games (SGs) are games that have a serious purpose besides the entertainment of the player. SGs are used in various sectors with quite promising results. One field that SGs are used is education, since SGs are considered to offer promising technology enhanced learning opportunities. This paper focuses on SGs that aim to deal with the limitat...

Nowadays, the mobile industry is one of the most lucrative sectors with smartphone and tablet gaming growing year over year. In recent years, several commercial GPS-enabled AR location-aware mobile games have been presented that try to combine real world locations with in-game activities such as Ingress or Geocaching. However, besides the obvious u...

The transition from school life to independent living is an important and demanding step for every person. People with Intellectual Disability (ID) and people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) face more difficulties in this transition due to their limitations in daily living skills. Serious Games (SGs) are considered as a promising tool that can...

Background. Learning programming is a cognitively demanding field of study accompanied with various difficulties. Although there is a high demand in the market for programmers, software analysts and engineers, a high dropout rate is recorded in relevant fields of study. Serious games are a promising means of engaging students in learning programmin...

In this paper current trends in online educational games for teaching programming concepts, or else computational thinking, to primary school students are analyzed. Specifically, several online games such as CodeMonkey, Getcoding, Kodable, Lightbot, Program Your Robot, Rapid Router and Run Marco are briefly presented. This is followed by a comparat...

This paper reports students’ perceptions and experiences attending an object-oriented programming course in which they developed software using the Distributed Pair Programming (DPP) technique. Pair programming (PP) is typically performed on one computer, involving two programmers working collaboratively on the same code or algorithm. DPP on the ot...

Although numerous technologies are available for developing web applications, PHP holds the lions’ share of web content today. PHP offers several features that enable developers to easily produce dynamically extendible code, forming an entire ecosystem of standard as well as more ‘exotic’ opportunities that can be exploited. One reason that drives...

This paper reports students’ perceptions and experiences attending an object-oriented programming course in which they developed software using the Distributed Pair Programming (DPP) technique. Pair programming (PP) is typically performed on one computer, involving two programmers working collaboratively on the same code or algorithm. DPP on the ot...

Pair programming (PP) has become popular in the research and software industry as well as being studied for a number of years in computer science courses with positive findings on student performance and attitudes. Advantages of PP reported in the literature are satisfaction, design quality, code productivity, team building, and communication. More...

Pair Programming (PP) has a long history both in software industry and education. More recently, specially designed environments have made possible the application of Distributed Pair Programming (DPP) as well. In our institution we have applied DPP in the context of an undergraduate Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) course for five years. Specific...

Background. Health constitutes a major field in serious games because of the wide range of applications and the significant contribution to humans and society. The spectrum of games for health meets the needs for education, training, treatment, rehabilitation, research, well-being, prevention, motivation and others. Aim. Cells of War is a serious...

Lay Description What is already known about this topic: People with intellectual disabilities have major limitations in adaptive behaviour and intellectual functioning skills. People with autism have significant challenges in social skills, speech communication, and repetitive behaviours. Technology enhances the learning process of people with inte...

Educational games are increasingly used in informal and formal educational settings for promoting active learning and gaining students’ interest in cognitively demanding subjects, such as programming. However, empirical studies that investigate the true impact of educational games on teaching and learning programming, especially to small aged stude...

Background. Programming is widely known to be a cognitively demanding field. Learning programming can be a strenuous task without the proper guidance and methodology. Students often face difficulties in understanding even the most basic and fundamental concepts of programming, leading to their confusion and disappointment. Serious games for program...

In this paper current trends in online educational games for teaching programming concepts, or else computational thinking, to primary school students are analyzed. Specifically, several online games such as CodeMonkey, Getcoding, Kodable, Lightbot, Program Your Robot, Rapid Router and Run Marco are briefly presented. This is followed by a comparat...

Educating people with intellectual disabilities (ID) is a challenging process. Educators and researchers promote new methods in order to enhance the learning process and succeed in improving specific skills that people with intellectual disabilities have limitations. Serious games (SG) used in special education are considered as a successful tool f...

Mobile technology is becoming an integral part of student’s life. The new mobile landscape shifts the educational ground demanding for innovative ways to create games for educational purposes. Location-based games provide new opportunities for effective learning in authentic environments. On the other hand, this game genre poses new challenges to e...

Educating people with intellectual disabilities (ID) or autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a non-trivial process and differs from the learning methods of typically developed people. Recently, serious games (SGs) have been used to enhance the learning process of these groups and address different skills. On the other hand, blended learning (BL) is ap...

Nowadays, computer literacy is common at a very early age. As mobile devices and new social communication trends are increasingly integrating in the modern digital lifestyle new opportunities arise for harnessing this potential for innovative serious purposes. Location-based games that layer educational activities with game play can help players ga...

The choice of the first programming language (FPL) has been a controversial issue for several decades. Nearly everyone agrees that the FPL is important and affects students’ subsequent education on programming. The study presented in this article investigates the suitability of various C-like and Pascal-like programming languages as a FPL. Students...

Pair Programming has been shown to increase productivity and code quality not only in professional software development but also in the context of programming education. The provision of broadband Internet access gave rise to Distributed Pair Programming (DPP) enabling two programmers to collaborate remotely. To gain insight into the benefits of DP...

Background. Educational games are nowadays used for facilitating the teaching and learning process of various subjects. History is one of the subjects that simulations and games are used for promoting active learning and supporting students in comprehending various history-related subjects. Aim. This article reports on a new educational game on Gr...

Game engines are tools that expedite the highly demanding process of developing games. Nowadays, the great interest of people from various fields on serious games has made even more demanding the usage of game engines, since people with limited coding skills are also involved in developing serious games. Literature in the field has studied game eng...

Background. Higher education on simulation & gaming has a long history with several master degrees offered by Universities worldwide. Currently, the popularity of Serious Games (SGs) has resulted in an increased interest on relevant master degrees. Despite the large number of master degrees on games in general, the literature on designing and evalu...

Educating people with intellectual disabilities (ID) or autism spec-trum disorder (ASD) is a non-trivial process and differs from the learning methods of typically developed people. Recently, serious games (SGs) have been used to enhance the learning process of these groups and address different skills. On the other hand, blended learning (BL) is a...

Nowadays, computer literacy is common at a very early age. As mobile devices and new social communication trends are increasingly integrating in the modern digital lifestyle new opportunities arise for harnessing this potential for innovative serious purposes. Location-based games that layer educational activities with game play can help players ga...

Technology enhanced learning (TEL) is increasingly influencing university education, mainly in overcoming disadvantages of direct instruction teaching approaches, and encouraging creativity, problem solving and critical thinking in student-centered, interactive learning environments. In this paper, experiences from object-oriented programming (OOP)...

Pair Programming (PP) has been extensively used for enhancing the learning of programming. Specifically, PP is considered to: make the learning of programming more pleasant, promote collaboration and communication between the members of pairs, encourage the sharing of knowledge and skills, and even improve code quality. More recently, systems have...

Teaching and learning programming constitutes a challenge. Although several teaching approaches and programming tools have been proposed, it seems that they have limited impact on classroom practice. This article investigates students’ perceptions on five educational programming environments that are widely used and the features that any introducto...

PHP is one of the most frequently used scripting languages for server-side programming, since approximately 75% of successful web applications have been developed with PHP. The main benefits of PHP are its low learning curve and the rich variety of dynamic features that it offers. These benefits have contributed towards the development of a large c...

As mobile users take their devices with them everywhere, adding location-awareness and incorporating geographic data into the applications is an important way to keep users connected to the surrounding world and people nearby, enhancing the overall contextual experience. Through the use of sensors like GPS, accelerometer, gyroscope and more on a mo...

People with Intellectual Disabilities (ID) are those who have low intellectual abilities and limitations in behavioural and social functioning. ID can be observed in a very early stage in their lives, while every person with ID has individual characteristics. Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a mental disorder that causes issues in social, communic...

Distributed Pair Programming (DPP) is widely known to promote collaboration and knowledge sharing among novice programmers, while it engages them in carrying out programming assignments. Moreover, DPP is a means of experiencing agile software development techniques that are considered important in the software market. In this paper, we share some e...

Designing and deploying programming courses is undoubtedly a challenging task. In this paper, an attempt to analyze important aspects of a sequence of two courses on imperative-procedural and object-oriented programming in a non-CS majors Department is made. This analysis is based on a questionnaire filled in by fifty students in a voluntary basis....

Computer programming has for decades posed several difficulties for students of all educational levels. A number of teaching approaches have been proposed over the years but none seems to fulfil the needs of students nowadays. Students use computers mainly for playing games and the Internet and as quite a few researchers state this aspect of comput...

Since pair programming appeared in the literature as an effective method of teaching computer programming, many systems were developed to cover the application of pair programming over distance. Today's systems serve personal, professional and educational purposes allowing distributed teams to work together on the same programming project. The curr...

In this paper, different aspects and experiences from object-oriented programming courses that are taught in three institutions from three different European countries are presented and compared. The emphasis is given on courses' syllabus, organization and methodology of teaching and ways and methods of evaluation of students' knowledge and program...

Specially designed programming environments have been used for decades to support the novice programmers learning programming. In this paper, we present various forms of Educational Technology that have guided the design of educational programming environments the last two decades. The design and aspirations of three distinct programming environmen...

The tremendous popularity of mobile computing and Android in particular has attracted millions of developers who see opportunities for building their own start-ups. As a consequence Computer Science students express an increasing interest into the related technology of Java development for Android applications. Android projects are complex by natur...

The Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) technique is nowadays the most popular programming technique among tertiary education institutions. However, learning OOP is a cognitively demanding task for undergraduate students. Several difficulties and misconceptions have been recorded in the literature for both OOP concepts and languages, mainly Java. Thi...

The results presented in this paper contribute to research on two different areas of teaching methods: distributed pair programming (DPP) and computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL). An evaluation study of a DPP system that supports collaboration scripts was conducted over one semester of a computer science course. Seventy-four students pa...

Games for learning are currently used in several disciplines for motivating students and enhancing their learning experience. This new approach of technology-enhanced learning has attracted researchers’ and instructors’ attention in the area of programming that is one of the most cognitively demanding fields in Computer Science. Several educational...

Games for learning are currently used in several disciplines for motivating students and enhancing their learning experience. This new approach of technology-enhanced learning has attracted researchers' and instructors' attention in the area of programming that is one of the most cognitively demanding fields in Computer Science. Several educational...

The initial stage of the learning programming process is an arduous task. Novice students have to simultaneously learn the syntax of a programming language, understand the algorithmic logic that each program is based on as well as comprehend the basic concepts of the programming principles. The problems students are faced with become even greater w...

A new generation of computer games has taken over during the last few years, called Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG). In parallel, the usage of games in education has increased, exploiting the fact that young people are familiarized with them and would be more motivated to learn while entertained. However, MMORPG require signi...

Mobile apps have been around for only a few years, but have gained immense consumer attention. Developers creating native apps are faced with the daunting task of maintaining different sources for each target platform, while web and hybrid apps are faced with a series of technical and non technical issues. Native apps function smoothly in a standar...

The educational landscape continues to transform significantly in a way that it engages students' interest and improves learning processes. Such an example is the gradual use of educational games, which seem to be an exceptional means to motivate and engage students in ways that will make learning more challenging and interesting for them. However,...

Teaching and learning computer programming presents teachers and students respectively with many challenges, especially when taught with the “traditional� approach. Several alternative teaching approaches were proposed the previous years, but they seem not to fulfil successfully the needs of the twenty-first century students. Students nowadays are...

Computer science is continuously evolving during the past decades. This has also brought forth new knowledge that should be incorporated and new learning strategies must be adopted for the successful teaching of all sub-domains. For example, computer programming is a vital knowledge area within computer science with constantly changing curriculum a...

As an integral element of Future Internet, Internet of Things (IoT) could be described as a real-world interaction with everything connected via intelligent network infrastructure and advanced communication technologies. Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC), on the other hand, offers an infrastructure wherein both data storage and data processing take plac...

The initial stage of the learning programming process is an arduous task. Novice students have to simultaneously learn the syntax of a programming language, understand the algorithmic logic that each program is based on as well as comprehend the basic concepts of the programming principles. The problems students are faced with become even greater w...

Computer science is gradually changing, evolving and adapting according to the needs of each time period by incorporating the technological developments available. However, despite the occurring changes and the current progress in the domain, computer programming is still a vital chapter within computer science, and its teaching remains a difficult...

This paper focuses on enhancing software quality in students’ programs. To this end, related work is reviewed and proposals for applying pedagogical software metrics in programming courses are presented. Specifically, we present the main advantages and disadvantages of using pedagogical software metrics, as well as some proposals for utilizing feat...

Nowadays, native mobile applications (mobile apps) are targeted at specific mobile platforms. This phenomenon imposes severe constraints, such as the use of different development environments, technologies, and APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) for each mobile platform, leading inevitably to a waste of development time and effort, and an in...

Web-based games have become significantly popular during the last few years. This is due to the gradual increase of internet speed, which has led to the ongoing multiplayer games development and more importantly the emergence of the Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) field. In parallel, similar technologies called educational ga...

Successful computer programming education is facing significant problems even nowadays for both students and teachers. To this end, the specificities of those difficulties and the corresponding causes continue to be an ongoing topic of research. According to relevant case studies, these relate to the complex concepts of computer programming as well...

Collaboration scripts provide an integrated framework aimed to foster fruitful collaboration in collaborative learning settings. Since pair programming is also a form of collaborative learning, we explored whether collaboration scripts can improve collaboration in distributed pair programming. For this purpose, we incorporated collaboration scripts...

Programming environments based on an iconic, flowchart-based notation have been widely used in the context of introducing novices to programming. These tools were initially heavily based on the technology of structure editing, with the aim of alleviating the burden of focusing on the syntactic details of programming languages and giving the chance...

The integration of ICT in Primary and Secondary Education is considered of great importance for the enhancement of both teaching and learning. However, a successful integration of ICT in the teaching practice requires a well-organized training of teachers. In this paper, we present qualitative results from a national-scale program aiming at trainin...

Programming microworlds are being used for introducing students to programming for many years. Although many professors and schoolteachers, report positive results from using programming microwords, these results are usually based on anecdotal evidence rather than rigorous empirical evaluation. A question that has not been answered yet with certain...

Object oriented programming (OOP) is a complex domain in the education field and requires proper technological underpinning for the facilitation of the process. However, the vast variety of available programming environments makes the selection of the most efficient technology that will cover students' needs and will lead to the teachers' desired l...

With the explosive growth of the mobile applications and emerging of Cloud Computing (CC) concept, Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) has been introduced to be a potential technology for mobile services. MCC refers to an infrastructure where both the data storage and the data processing happen outside of the mobile device. One of the technologies that wi...

Teaching and learning programming is widely known to be quite problematic. Designing and deploying programming courses is also quite complex. Several choices have to made, such as selecting the first programming technique and language, the sequence of programming techniques presented to students, the programming environments and the teaching approa...

The main concern of this paper is the exploration of current challenges, teaching techniques, course design methods and topics covered when attempting to teach a web programming course in technology-oriented higher education departments. The authors attempted a literature review of the subject in order to identify, compare and analyse the existing...