Gamified Virtual Reality for Computational Thinking

Abstract

In Computer Science Education, coding activities are extremely important to teach younger students the basics of programming and computational thinking. To provide an immersive experience, in this paper, we propose VRCoding, a Virtual Reality (VR)-based block coding system. VRCoding can teach computational thinking in an immersive Virtual Reality environment, exploiting passive haptics to improve interaction and give tactile feedback to the users. Passive haptics is obtained using simple physics placeholders, i.e., textured parallelepipeds, that are tracked in real-Time, and aligned with the coding blocks in VR. The system is tested on a group of secondary school users, performing simple coding exercises with a standard monitor-based block coding environment and with the proposed VRCoding block language. Results show positive feedback concerning the sense of presence and the user experience.