Noisrucer: A Student-developed Game for Recursion

We would like to present Noisrucer, a student-developed puzzle game that helps computer science (CS) students better understand recursion, a key CS concept.The game has been built using the Unity engine and has been in development since 2019.The game guides players through many levels to help them understand how to arrange commands to solve a variety of puzzles.Noisrucer's levels emulate some of the functionality built into programming languages such as conditions, state, subroutines, procedures, and recursion, which allows players to practice their CS skills.Noisrucer expands and goes beyond similar games in the genre by adding several pedagogical features to help players strengthen their recursion skills.By animating a pseudocode solution written by the player, each level provides a unique programming-like experience from which the player can learn.To augment our efforts in understanding the educational experience for players, a data logger has been added to record player's in-game interactions.These logs can be analyzed via a web-based dashboard developed by our team.We have begun to collect data on the game by running participant trials, who along with the game, have completed pre-test and post-test surveys adapted from previous recursion studies and game user experience surveys.