Educational Games for Self Learning in Introductory Programming Courses - a Straightforward Design Approach with Progression Mechanisms

During the relatively short history of Computer science and programming education, the pass rate has been low in most introductory programming courses at the university level. Students taking courses have had severe problems in the understanding of how to construct algorithms and also with the use and implementation of basic programming techniques. There are identified bottlenecks in theoretical concepts, but there have also been problems with the solving of assignments and more practical parts of programming courses. Educational games aimed at teaching programming have frequently been discussed in academic research during the last years. There have also been a few attempts at developing educational games with the objective of teaching basic programming concepts but most of them are in our opinion either too complicated with the target audience being experienced gamers, or that they are oversimplified to suit younger students. Although games designed specifically for learning have proven to be most efficient, an objection has been that they are too expensive. What features are really needed to engage students in a programming game? Do we need to make games that resemble the gaming industry's high end games at a cost of 20 to 30 million Euros per title in order to motivate students in university courses? The aim of this paper is to describe and discuss the development and evaluation of an Educational game prototype for programming courses at university level. A qualitative approach with semi-structured interviews has been used in the evaluation of the prototype. This study evaluates an approach using different progression mechanisms to attempt to motivate the players along with a straightforward narrative that situates the learning of various programming concepts. Players get various programming missions on different levels to solve in different Swedish cities. After a completed mission players get virtual money for their work with code solutions in the Python programming language. After completing some basic programming jobs in Sweden the player will get access to higher levels where more advanced programming techniques are required for solving programming missions outside of Sweden. A game prototype has been developed in the Flash development environment using the Action Script programming language. Findings show that the game could help students to improve their programming skills and our recommendation is that educational games should be used for self learning in introductory programming courses. Straightforward progression mechanisms seem to increase the players' motivation but if the unlocking mechanisms in the game could appear more randomly and non-linear it would make the playing more exciting. The described prototype is, because of database dependency, not that easy to distribute in programming courses. An improvement would be to adapt the game for use in the Moodle EduGame module and have the gaming as a voluntary extra activity amongst others in programming courses given in the Moodle virtual learning environment. However, different students have different learning styles and educational games are not a solution that will solve all problems in programming courses. There are also students that do not even like the idea of replacing the traditional learning material with game playing, but as a complementary tool for self learning we find the described approach promising. We also claim that this kind of game can be developed without the 10 million euro budgets that often are the base today for development of commercial computer games.