Pop-up Java: An Augmented Reality Mobile Game to Teach Java

As computers become more and more ubiquitous, it becomes increasingly important and prevalent to teach coding. Coding builds important life skills such as organization, higher order thinking, self-esteem, socialization and teamwork, among many others. However, learning the skills necessary to design and create an efficient program from scratch takes a lot of practice that can often be confusing and frustrating to newcomers. There are a large number of programming languages in the world, each with their own merits. The TIOBE Programming Community Index calculates the popularity of programming languages by tallying search queries on major search engines, and shows that Java is and has been the most widely used programming language for over a decade. A similar site called PYPL that aggregates results from Google Trends shows that Java makes up over 23% of programming language related queries, far outweighing any other programming languages on the list with python at 14% and PHP at 9.7%. Popular online job board Dice.com reports that Java-related job postings are much more common than other languages (What’s Hot (and Not) in Tech Skills, 2016), and the trend search on similar job board indeed.com shows that there are 2-3 or more Java-related job postings for every equivalent posting for other languages such as C++, Python, or C#. Despite Java’s popularity, pedagogical instruction of Java is typically handled in a standard lecture-and-exercises format. With the advancement of technology, there is always room for new technologies to emerge to provide new ways of learning. This paper presents an Pop-up Java, an augmented reality educational game that aims to teach Java programming constructs in an easy to use, fun, and immersive environment