Educational MMORPG for Computer Science: DeBugger, a Virtual Lab on PC and Smart Phones Ilmi Yoon 1 , Arno Puder 1 , Gary Ng 1 , Manori Thakur 1 , Hunvil Rodrigues 1 , and Jae H. Paik 2 1 Computer Science, SFSU, 2 Psychology, SFSU San Francisco, CA, USA Eun-Young Kang Computer Science, CSULA Los Angeles, CA, USA Abstract— There are two important observed facts for this research. One is that computer games with social interactions have become strong cultures to young students. The other is that introducing a computer programming language to majority of students is challenging as programming paradigm and concepts are completely alien to most of them. In this research, we introduce a Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) named “DeBugger”. It is developed to utilize the MMORPG online culture to introduce computer science education to improve learning outcome. Considering the increase in awareness and early exposure to programming at high school or even at middle school, developing publicly available multiplayer online educational games for CS students is a timely and sought effort. The DeBugger aims to build a collection of educational mini games within a virtual community of learners where players fight with bugs by solving problems, interact with other players and continue to play on smart phones during mobile gaming. The DeBugger is designed to take advantage of social interactions, mobile games and community to retain players longer, promote players to solve more quests, and encourage players to discuss and learn from each other more actively, which encourages peer learning and tutoring. A positive efficacy testing of the DeBugger on learning and social interaction among students will be discussed in paper. Keywords— Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game; Video Game; Java; Programming; Computer Education; Mobile Games I. INTRODUCTION Recent computer science education strongly recognized the significance of abundant exposure at an early age in improving one’s computational thinking and problem solving approach [1,2]. Similar to Algebra, for example, where concept of variables in algebraic expressions takes some exposure time to get familiar to most 5-7th grade students, concept of variables in programming language also takes some time to become familiar. Moreover, learning computational approach usually takes sufficiently iterative practices for core concepts (variables, data types, logical flow, conditional statements, iteration, objects, methods, etc…) for most students whether young or not. To shorten the learning curve and to entertain the iterative learning process, game-based learning tools can be an effective aid for computer education. MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) is one of noticeable approach in education. Among many computer science courses, introductory computer science course (CS1) has become pilot course for MOOC and diverse approaches are being explored. Majority of these approaches focuses on lecturing mechanism and interactions between the instructor and students even though peer interactions have served important roles for learning explicitly or implicitly [3,4,5]. As much as effective instructor-student interactions are explored for MOOC, similar effort should be made to explore and develop means to improve peer interactions. Here, we argue that virtual community where students can meet each other and play collaboratively or competitively via educational game challenges will serve as virtual labs and provide an atmosphere for desirable peer interaction. In addition, DeBugger game can be continuously played on Android and iPhone while students are away from computer. Section 2 discusses related work; using multiplayer game for educational purposes and other game-like approach for CS education. Section 3 discusses the principles of designing the DeBugger game and section 4 discusses implementations of Android version and cross-compilation of the game for iPhone version, community features within the DeBugger game, and game architect. Section 5 presents results of user trial and on- going efficacy evaluation and implementations. Section 6 concludes the paper. II. RELATED WORK Game-based learning has been an active area of educational research with hopes that playing game would effectively aid students’ learning. Large number of studies showed the educational impact of the game-based approach [6]. Educational games (also called edutainment, serious game, gamification) have been adapted and used in diverse areas such as elementary math to professional medical trainings [7,8]. Recent study shows that game-based education reaches beyond original objective of educational and motivates players to achieve much more [9]. Cooper [9] utilized multiplayer online game as social interactions serve well to motivate players. Other studies also showed significance of social interactions in the game to retain players longer. Figure 1 shows the general play time of stand-alone game vs. MMORPG game; games with social interactions keep players longer over time [10]. We observed that popular MMORPG games are retaining their players for very long period time (months to years) and invite friends to play together (spread through human network). Recently, Farmville, a relatively simple farm nurturing (crops or farm animals) Facebook game made a nice show case of how quickly a game can spread through social interactions (80 million active players) and keep players playing repeatedly.