Learning programming with serious games

2010

Studies of using games for learning have being widely discussed in various literatures. This is due to believes that educational games (EG) can offer many learning benefits such as motivation, engagement and fun. Learning Programming requires many skills such as logical thinking and problem solving as well as understanding of abstract concepts. As a result, many students found that Programming is a challenging subject which resulted in low motivation to study the subject. Thus, it is worth to study how educational games help to enhance our students learning attitude towards Programming. This paper will discuss on our pilot study of students' perceptions towards using educational games as their learning medium. Findings indicated that the attitude of most students are positive and they are also more motivated to learn Programming by using games compared to conventional method. Hopefully, this research provides some insights to understand our students' perceptions regarding educational games usage in their learning.

International Journal of …, 2009

Video games are part of our culture like TV, movies, and books. We believe that this kind of software can be used to increase students' interest in computer science. Video games with other goals than entertainment, serious games, are present, today, in several fields such as education, government, health, defence, industry, civil security, and science. This paper presents a study around a serious game dedicated to strengthening programming skills. Real-Time Strategy, which is a popular game genre, seems to be the most suitable kind of game to support such a serious game. From programming teaching features to video game characteristics, we define a teaching organisation to experiment if a serious game can be adapted to learn programming.

This chapter aims to present Code, a friendly environment where students without previous programming experience can explore core-programming concepts in a motivating manner. It consists of a platform style game where students can control a virtual robot having their first contact with the construction of small pseudocode blocks. Research in teaching and learning of programming present several reasons for the difficulties students face when starting programming. In this chapter we have pointed out some of them. The studies performed also indicated that the aspects related to problem solving are the principal factors to attack in order to solve this problem. However, the main concern is how to provide a motivating environment that engages the student in computational thinking and problem solving. Code Factory's main objective is to create a new strategy making learning more stimulating for the students emphasizing problem solving in order to help develop fundamental programming skills.

Computer programming is a core subject in most Computer science programmes at university level but many students have difficulties with both the understanding of theoretical concepts and with the learning of practical programming skills. Several studies have pointed out that there exist pedagogical and motivational problems resulting in high drop-out rates and low learning outcomes. On the other hand today’s students have grown up in a digital and internet connected world where playing computer games is a common and appreciated spare time activity. It has been discussed during many years amongst teachers and researchers which important features a programming language should have to support learning and which the appropriate programming paradigms are for introductory programming courses. Less has been discussed and written about modifying the actual course content and use the recognised attraction and catalytic effect of computer games. The aim of this case study is to describe, anal...

Gamification-Based E-Learning Strategies for Computer Programming Education, 2000

Casual games are characterized for their fast learning curve. Casual games tasks usually are short and have increasing difficulty. This seems an interesting approach to learn and practice introductory computer programming concepts for students that face difficulties. Many of serious games intended to support computer programming learning are commercial and aimed at children. Also only a few of those described in the literature are available to teachers. This chapter describes the development of a new game that aims to support introductory computer programming learning and its pilot study with three undergraduate introductory classes. The chapter proposes a set of design principles that might be useful in the development of casual games to support computer programming learning. These principles resulted from the experiment and include game features that were considered important to engage students and to improve some students' computer programming skills.

Communications in Computer and Information Science

In recent years, games are used to increase the level of knowledge and experience of individuals working in different domains. Especially in the education field, there are several different serious games to teach the subjects of the lectures or other educational materials to students in an enjoyable way. Hence, this study proposes a quantitative research approach to increase the programming knowledge levels of the first-year undergraduate students at computer engineering departments. For this aim, a responsive web platform was developed to teach the syntax and logic of C programming language by using some game elements. Therefore, the students have a chance to repeat the topics related to C programming language continuously since the platform is always accessible. To figure out the efficiency of the designed environment, 10 first-year computer engineering students were selected. According to the results obtained from the user tests, this game can be used as an educational tool, which supports the traditional training methods, to increase the knowledge levels of students about the syntax and logic of C programming language.

Computer programming is a core subject in most Computer science programmes at university level but many students have difficulties with both the understanding of theoretical concepts and with the learning of practical programming skills. Several studies have pointed out that there exist pedagogical and motivational problems resulting in high drop-out rates and low learning outcomes. On the other hand today's students have grown up in a digital and internet connected world where playing computer games is a common and appreciated spare time activity. It has been discussed during many years amongst teachers and researchers which important features a programming language should have to support learning and which the appropriate programming paradigms are for introductory programming courses. Less has been discussed and written about modifying the actual course content and use the recognised attraction and catalytic effect of computer games. The aim of this case study is to describe, analyze and discuss the concept of learning to program by game construction. In this case study two course analyses have been combined with a literature review on pedagogy for Game Based Learning (GBL Findings from the literature review show that the idea of students constructing knowledge in their interactions with their environment is not a new one and that games have been used in educational contexts long before the introduction of computers. The idea of Game based learning has support in the constructivist learning theory concept that was introduced theoretically at university level in the 1970s by Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky. Results from the study also indicate that the practical application of the game construction concept has been successful in the two investigated programming courses both when it comes to student motivation and learning outcomes. Furthermore, this game based pedagogy can motivate students not only to develop themselves as future programmers but also to become more innovative and entrepreneurial by improving the quality and performance of the games in order to deploy, promote and sell them.

Computer science is continuously evolving during the past decades. This has also brought forth new knowledge that should be incorporated and new learning strategies must be adopted for the successful teaching of all sub-domains. For example, computer programming is a vital knowledge area within computer science with constantly changing curriculum and its teaching remains a difficult endeavour. On the other hand, students start from a very early age to interact with computers through games and other entertaining multimedia software. Therefore, they seem to be keen on environments with impressive special effects and graphical interfaces where they interact with the environment's elements. In response, teachers are trying to connect computer programming learning with computer operations that students are familiar with, which does not include textual editors for programming lines of code with no other interaction. Educational games used in computer programming courses are considered to benefit learning, because they motivate students towards actively participating and interacting with the game's activities. Thus, we have developed an educational multiplayer game that aims to further enhance computer programming education by addressing occurring problems. This process, however, requires proper planning during the design of educational games, and thus the availability of adequate guidelines that include all characteristics that should be incorporated in such games. This paper aims to introduce and elaborate on a holistic framework that has been constructed as a guide towards the development of this game. To this end, we study existing frameworks that have been proposed for the design of educational games and document features currently supported by educational games that teach computer programming. We conclusively propose the framework we have constructed for the design of our game. This framework can be used for the design of other computer programming-specific educational games and extended for other educational domains.

We present a study on the use of serious games in teaching a basic programming course through an English communication class for non-science major students in a Moroccan high school. The objective was to get students interested in learning programming through an interactive communication course. Previous studies have shown that non-science major students lack interest in learning programming either because of poor teaching methodologies or poor interaction within the subject. In order to make the programming course learning environment more motivating, we adopted a new pedagogical approach based on serious games different from the traditional teaching practices. To evaluate our approach, we experiment it with a group of 40 non-science major students arbitrarily selected. The students were divided into two groups, the first group had to create animated English stories and dialogues using Scratch environment while the other group followed a conventional method. A survey was conducted at the beginning of the experiment in order to identify students' level and prerequisites. Another survey was handed out right after the experiment in order to assess students' motivation and interest for basic programming. The analysis of these surveys showed that combining the use of Scratch as an environment for learning basic programming, and English stories creation, motivates more non-science students for programming and makes them more autonomous in their learning. 80% of the experimental group believes in continuing to learn basic programming whereas only 5% of the control group does. Moreover, 90% of the first group asserted that creating animated English stories and dialogues with Scratch allowed them to learn better than in a normal English session. : 77-89 | 84 and programming. The questionnaire also would show the opinion of the students in group "A" about using Scratch environment in English sessions. It is important to note here that students were fully guided by explaining the different elements of the questionnaire and also the key words like: creativity, amusing, interesting, cooperative … Ouahbi et al. (2014) To conclude, it is important to note that at the beginning of the actual school year, the students of group "A" as well as their English teacher have suggested restarting the experience and learning more about programming. This shows that they have had an interesting experience.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 2011

For beginners in computer programming, the learning curve can be in many cases quite steep, especially if it is their first contact with this area. Plus, the traditional learning methodologies are usually based on doing countless exercises that aim to cover many areas, but are often disconnected from each other and can become tiresome, as they offer little immediate rewards to the student. Nowadays serious games technology offers tools that may have potential to help computer programming students to become more engaged on their learning through a 'learn while having fun' approach. This paper aims to generally describe our approach on the creation of a platform for deploying serious computer games for the teaching of any computer programming language. We will begin by describing the game mechanics, followed by the general system architecture and its data model, finalizing with a small conclusion.