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HONS 06/09

Computer Science Education in Virtual Worlds

Benjamin Kearns
Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering
University of Canterbury

Abstract

The Computer Science Unplugged project has developed a variety of activities that allow children to be taught computer science concepts without using computers. Currently users in some environments and users with disabilities are not able to participate in some of the activities. In order to solve this problem, we investigate using the activities implemented in a virtual world. In this research, we discuss development of an implementation of the Turing test activity, the practical issues we encountered while deploying it to a local school and the general lessons to be learned for people deploying such activities. Finally we compare its effectiveness against the traditional Computer Science Unplugged activities.