Supporting Learning Programming Using Educational Digital Games

Contemporary education promotes the usage of digital games to support learning programming. Such games are not designed for entertainment, but specifically for educational purposes. Students start from a very early age to interact with computers through games and consequently, react positively on the educational digital games. When used for education, digital games have the potential to motivate students towards active participation and interaction. In addition, educational digital games make complex and abstract topics like programming more friendly. Games that support learning programming enable students to learn programming concepts using visual interfaces and interesting environments. In these games, younger students are usually expected to move the main character around the given path and perform a series of tasks (e.g. collect objects, skip the obstacles). Instead in a textual editor, students are coding through drag and drop interactions, and create programs that include basic programming concepts like sequence, variables, loops, and conditions. Furthermore, digital games are a good for visualizing the execution of algorithms that are often hard to understand. To make the game more interesting, the main character is often presented as an animated robot, animal or a cartoon character familiar to the students. The paper explores the possibilities of using existing digital games in learning basic programming skills, highlighting which programming concepts the game supports and for which it is recommended and appropriate to be used. This is the first step in the design of an educational game that is intended to develop within the "Coding4Girls" and "Digital games" projects. Future activities and plans for both projects are presented in the paper.