Development and Evaluation of an Educational Game to Practice the Truth Tables of Logic

Abstract

Already for years, the logic course in the first year of our Bachelor program in Computer Science has been a serious stumbling block for many students. They find the formal and abstract mechanisms of logic difficult and awkward to deal with. Many procrastinate, which results in poor understanding of the basic principles, which in turn causes them to fall even more behind. Previous attempts to remedy this have had little effect. Since educational games are deemed as an enjoyable way to foster learning, we decided to develop an educational game for the course. The game is a two-player competitive game inspired by an existing card game. We adapted this card game to proposition logic and digitized it as an app. The development was done in an iterative way. Each version was evaluated and based on the received feedback the software was improved and reevaluated. Based on the results of the evaluations we can conclude that the game is well suited for its target audience and is a good complement, and even replacement for some of the traditional face-to-face exercise sessions. However, we also noticed that making the game available without obligation to use was not the best approach. A good embedding into the course is needed to ensure that all students use the game. In this paper we present the game, explain and motivate its evolution, and present lessons learned.