Big Owen’s Data Dash is a platformer game meant to help students visualize and understand data structures. Entities in the game are visual representations of data structures and should have the same structure and possible operations as them.
The goal is that when students play and interact with the game and complete levels, they will experiment with and observe the changes on these game entities and gain a deeper understanding of them. Since the game entities are analogous to data structures, students learning how the game entities work also means they learn how the data structure works.
The game also features Tiled level editor support and logging for future educational studies and log data analysis.
- Installation
- Usage
- Contributing
- Roadmap
- Research
- Credits
- License
The game is made with Unity version 5.6.0. You can download it here by looking under the Unity 5.x tab. Clone the repository and open the project with Unity. The game is called DataStructureEdGame.
Once the project is open, clicking the Play will start the game at its log-on screen. In educational studies, this is used for participants to log on with a unique Player ID so log data can be associated with each participant. You can bypass the log-in screen by clicking the “Debug Login” button. If you are unable to run the game, try right clicking on the Project window and select “Reimport all”.
Once you’re logged in, the world generator will generate the current level and the camera will focus on the player. Below is a screenshot with a few labels for the interface
For more details about the project structure, see the Project Structure wiki page.
You are free to contribute to either the game or to any associated software. Please submit a pull request with any changes.
If you have any suggestions, please leave an Issue with a Suggestion tag.
The vision is for this project is to develop a comprehensive game to help CS students learn a wide variety of data structures. Currently, it only implements Linked Lists. Please view the Roadmap wiki page for more future goals.
We encourage educational studies with this game. If you do use this for research, please include a link and a citation for this page. DOI coming soon.
Developed by Kevin Prehn, Anam Navied, and Nick Lytle.
Everything in this repository including the game and associated software is under the GNU General Public License v3.0.