Learning Basic Programing Skills With Educational Games: A Case of Primary Schools in Slovenia

This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of using educational games for learning basic programing skills. For this, we designed the game "Aladdin and his flying carpet" with all pedagogical consideration in mind. We conducted the experiment with 107 sixth grade pupils with no prior knowledge of programing. The game was applied at the beginning of the course in a naturalistic classroom environment. The progress was monitored and evaluated with validated pre- and posttests. The knowledge gain was observed according to the set of learning objectives from the general curricula, and minimum knowledge standards were pursued within those. The result demonstrated that most of the pupils achieved all of the observed learning objectives. The biggest progress was observed with the "complete a program" objective. The least progress was observed with the tasks where create a program and "divide a problem" objectives were combined. Strong correlation was found between the final results of the posttest and the scores from playing the game, especially with the more challenging "divide a problem" learning objective. Finally, no significant difference was observed in the results between girls and boys.