A game to test pointers: Path finding

Pointers are one of the most difficult to understand topics in programming courses. Since the topic is some virtual, the students of computer science face with difficulties in understanding. They hardly imagine the addresses of memory cells, their contents, and the pointers pointing to those memory cells. To test the knowledge and to reinforce the explanations done on the lecture hours, we have intended to create a game related to pointers. This game was constituted with the purpose of visualizing the concept of pointers into the students´ brains and so to increase the understanding of the subject. The students will not only listen the topic from the teacher or just write, but in an evaluation test, they will also see what is going on in the memory cells of their computer. This will make the teaching more and more permanent.