Video games as a medium for software education

Bradley R. C. Marques, Stephen P. Levitt, Ken J. Nixon

Abstract: Educational video games may be used as a medium for software visualisation and visual programming to provide highly enjoyable, self-motivating and inquiry-based pedagogical tools. An educational game has been developed and tested on university-level students in three iterations. Players are required to solve puzzles by programming the solutions; the game introduces syntax, conditional statements and logical operators. An integrated analytics system is used to store the time taken, the number of lines of code, and players' solutions to each level. Qualitative feedback indicates that the tool is very easy to learn because of the help system and user interface. A software quiz was administered before and after participants played the game. When tested on 14 applied computing students (who had formal exposure to programming), there was no increase in the average grade. In a group of 32 electrical engineering students (who had no exposure to programming at university), the game helped about 60% of participants increase their grade, by an average of 11%.