Design of serious games to assist the reading comprehension of technical texts

Abstract

Reading comprehension of technical texts is a very important skill that engineering students need to develop. One of the first encounters of engineering students with technical texts in English occurs in programming activities when using a C/C++ compiler, and errors are produced at compilation time. In this work, we present preliminary results of the design of serious games to assist reading comprehension of C compiling errors. We designed and evaluated low fidelity prototypes of games designed so that players can improve their reading comprehension skills at the micro-, and macro-level, i.e. focusing on technical vocabulary, and providing solutions and interpretations to the errors shown in the games. We evaluated the games to learn about their acceptability and whether the students would play them again.