Games as a motivation for freshman students to learn programming
María Feldgen, Osvaldo Clúa · 2005
Programming is a difficult skill to acquire. It is best learned by practice and, if students are to learn effectively, at least some of this practice have to be self-directed. Instructor's key role is to persuade our students to do this and thus to motivate them. In the past, our students identified programming as a vital skill in demand by industry. Consequently they were motivated to acquire a useful skill that would be relevant in some future job or lucrative career. Nowadays, our WEB age students have no idea why they have to study programming. Programming courses are seen simply as mandatory parts of the degree course to be negotiated. Their world of computing is multithreaded computer programs with impressive human interfaces for games and WEB. They cannot relate them with the classical programming exercises that ask for single-threaded programs performing a sequence of calculations. Given this, we decided to introduce our students in problem solving using what they view as real-world problems such as games and WEB-programming.