Learning Programming through Games and Contests: Overview, Characterisation and Discussion

Abstract

Learning of programming and, more generally, of computer science concepts is now reaching the public at large. It is not only reserved for people who studied informatics (computer science) or programming anymore. Teaching programming to schoolchildren presents many challenges: the big diversity in ability and aptitude levels; the big amount of different tools; the time-consuming nature of programming; and of course the difficulty to motivate schoolchildren to keep them busy with hard work. There are various platforms that offer to learn coding and programming, in particular game-based platforms, which are more and more popular. These latter exploits of the gamification process focused on increase in motivation and engagement of the learners. This paper reviews the main kinds of online platforms to learn programming and more general computer science concepts, and illustrates the review with concrete platforms examples.