CS Training for the Nintendo DS (report from the ISIE 2010 conference)
I am sitting in the lobby of the Palace Hotel in Bari, where the ISIE 2010 confernece is taking place. This is a huge conference (700+ attendees), most of them Electrical or Industrial Engineers. It feels weird to attend a conference in which most people are specialized in topics I only know shallowly (from my first years in college).
Then you may be thinking, “and what are you doing there?” Well, presenting a paper, of course.
This is the complete reference (no page numbers, the physical proceedings are not ready yet):
Roberto Tornero, Pablo Moreno-Ger, Javier Torrente, Baltasar Fernández Manjón (2010). CS Training: Introducing Mobile Educational Games in the Learning Flow. In proceedings of the 2010 IEEE International Symposium on Industrial Engineering (ISIE 2010). July 2010, Bari, Italy.
In this article we describe a line of research we officially opened about one year ago, working on the use of the Nintendo DS game console as an educational tool. We gathered ideas from Brain Training and created a game for practicing Computer Engineering exercises, named CS Training.
We have developed 10 mini-games related to different subjects in the computing curricula, and joined them together in a game similar to Brain Training (aka Brain Age, Train your Brain, etc.). These games can be practiced on the Nintendo DS anywhere and anytime, without pressure or limitations.
However, things start getting interesting when we use the “Evaluation mode”. This mode allows each student to take a measured challenge once a day. When the student starts the challenge, we use the console’s Wi-Fi connection to start a session on a Moodle server (entering user name and password on the console) and download a list of CSTraining-enabled courses. The student selects the course and the game begins!
In this mode, the DS will query the Moodle server to check which games should be presented to the student. The student completes the challenges, the game computes a final score and submits the score to Moodle. The coolest part? You can make these scores public and let the students compete for the best score.
Right now it is fully playable on the Nintendo DS, and we are working on a new and improved version including an editor. It is a very exciting project, I hope the community will like it.
