Learning to Program by Building Learning Games
Peter Mozelius, Marie Olsson · Diva portal (Dalarna University Library) · 2017
Digital games and digital gaming have had a fast expansion in the 21st century and today the vast majority playsome kind of digital games. From a teacher’s perspective an interesting type of games are the so called learning games andthe didactic idea of Game-based learning (GBL). In the last decade GBL has been an emerging field and several researchershave pointed out its strong learning potential. The aim of this study is to describe and discuss the idea of learning to programby game construction. The overall research strategy has been action research where the case study approach has beencombined with a content analysis of submitted learning games. Data has been collected from course evaluationquestionnaires, postings in online discussion fora and game analyses. Involved informants have been kept totally anonymousand game analyses are also presented with respect for personal integrity. Findings show that game construction can be anappreciated as well as stimulating way of designing course assignments, especially in programming courses involvingmultimedia and graphical user interfaces. The quality of students’ submissions show a wide variety and are stronglydependent on students pre-knowledge. Some of the student built learning games were found to have a potential for reuseas additional learning tools in introductory programming courses. However, to what degree and how needs to be assessedin a future study.