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Can Mobile Gaming Psychology Be Used to Improve Time Management on Programming Assignments?

Students often procrastinate on assignments, sometimes to the extent that it negatively affects their work. Although many solutions have been researched, instructors continue searching for effective techniques that are easy to employ and require little faculty overhead. This paper describes experiences adapting techniques inspired by commercially successful mobile games. These games use structural features that limit the player's play time, and use reward systems to encourage students to cultivate game-based resources (like energy, gold, credits, etc.). This combination of limits plus incentives shapes the way players manage their play time: it deters "binge" play sessions and strongly promotes the use of a much larger number of play sessions spread over a longer period of time. By adapting this to the assignment self-checking and turn-in process, we hope to exert a similar effect on how students manage their time in completing assignments. The goal is to shift students to start earlier and spread their work time out over a longer period, engaging with the assignment more frequently. In addition to combating procrastination, this also offers a longer time frame to seek help from course staff when problems arise. We report on experiences using this strategy over a year and a half in CS 1, discuss the impact on student submission patterns, when students begin their work, how they spread their work out over time, and student perceptions of the technique.