Learning to Program by Playing Learning Games

Game-based learning is an emerging field that has become a part of university education and several researchers describe its strong learning potential. For several subjects there is a rich flora of learning games and commercial-of-the-shelf games available, but for programming education in general and Python programming in particular, the situation is different. There exists an economical aspect as well and to develop learning games for programming education, might not interest the mainstream game industry and most universities do not have the resources needed to develop their own tailor-made learning games. Digital gaming in general has had a fast expansion during the last decade and the generation that now is entering the universities has a habit of regular gaming. At the same time there are several studies reporting about low motivated students in introductory programming courses. In a time when commercial games for programming education are rare, universities must look for affordable ways to construct appropriate learning games. This study has investigated the idea of using learning games developed by university students as additional learning tools in an introductory programming course. Five student constructed games for learning to program in Python have been analysed. Eventually two learning games were selected and tested as part of a five week introductory programming course. The overall strategy has been action research with the aim to improve an existing programming course. A group of students have played the games in two workshops where data has been collected in a mix of questionnaires, observations and group discussions. Findings indicate that the general idea seems to work, but as for all kind of course content, there need to be a thorough assessment and iterative refinement. Despite some found bugs and interface flaws the games had a challenging gameplay as well as learning outcomes. The game-based workshops also had a catalytic effect and created energy as well as curiosity among the participants. To what degree the games and the workshops contributed to concrete learning outcomes will be further analysed after the second examination deadline.