Towards a Serious Game to Help Students LearnComputer Programming

TLDR

Video games are a cultural staple alongside TV, movies, and books, and serious games—used in education, government, health, defence, industry, civil security, and science—are increasingly common, with Real‑Time Strategy identified as a particularly suitable genre for supporting programming education. The study aims to determine whether a serious game can boost students’ interest in computer science and strengthen their programming skills. The authors design a teaching framework that integrates programming instructional elements with video‑game characteristics to test whether a serious game can be adapted for programming learning.

Abstract

Video games are part of our culture like TV, movies, and books. We believe that this kind of software can be used to increase students′ interest in computer science. Video games with other goals than entertainment, serious games, are present, today, in several fields such as education, government, health, defence, industry, civil security, and science. This paper presents a study around a serious game dedicated to strengthening programming skills. Real‐Time Strategy, which is a popular game genre, seems to be the most suitable kind of game to support such a serious game. From programming teaching features to video game characteristics, we define a teaching organisation to experiment if a serious game can be adapted to learn programming.