Affective walkthroughs and heuristics: Evaluating minecraft hour of code

Abstract

This paper presents an evaluation of Code.org’s Minecraft Hour of Code that was created to encourage and support people initial learning of computer programming. In particular, this web-based software uses a spatial model world, where the learner’s programs manipulate the world. We applied the Affective Walkthrough and the Affective Heuristic Evaluation, proposed evaluation methods for affective learning in multimodal educational software. Our findings provided illumination about the Minecraft Hour of Code approach, highlighting some aspects that are successful, and others where improvement appears necessary.We also gained insight about the evaluation methods and their effectiveness.