TEACHING PROGRAMMING TO MIDDLE SCHOOL CHILDREN THROUGH THE DEVELOPMENT OF MOBILE GAMES

Teaching children programming through the development of video games has long been used in education in the field of information technology. Also, the actual direction in learning programming is to develop games and other applications for mobile devices. This approach has a number of advantages, such as additional motivation, applied focus, the ability to instantly apply knowledge in practice, the development of creativity. In addition, the capabilities of mobile devices expand the scope of teaching programming. When developing applications, you can use built-in devices such as accelerometer, compass, photo and video camera, GPS, etc. However, professional tools for creating applications for mobile devices are not always suitable for programming training. The programming language and development environment should be quite simple, but at the same time provide all the necessary functionality for creating games and other applications. In this paper, we describe our methodology for teaching programming through the development of mobile applications. To create applications in our course, we use the Gideros Studio development environment and Lua programming language. Our course is designed for children of secondary school age (10-12 years). Starting with writing the first program, the student tries on the role of the game developer. Studying of basic algorithms is carried out in the development of video game elements. The creative activity of the students has great importance in the learning process. In each lesson, the student not only learns the basics of programming, but also creates a product that evolves with the growth of the student's knowledge.