Coding peekaboom: a gaming mechanism for harvesting programming concepts

There are plentiful online programming resources that enable learners to develop an understanding of conceptual knowledge and practical implementation. However, learners, especially novices, often experience difficulties locating the required information to solve the programming problems. Differ from natural language in syntax and convention, answers for programming languages may not be found just by simple text information retrieval. To address this issue, Coding Peekaboom, a game-based tagging was developed to help adequately index the critical concepts of a code segment. An EEG device was applied to measure participants’ mental states to identify their engagement during the gameplay. Study results include the effectiveness of appropriate concepts collected by participants whereas 47.15 concepts were collected on average in a game. The brainwave analysis and the questionnaire results reveal that participants were highly engaged in the tagging task via Coding Peekaboom. Correlations were found between the state of flow and the number of concepts selected, score, and time. Finally, the results of the flow theory and personal traits were reported to reflect the user experiences in the game.