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A Review of Serious Games for Programming

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Serious Games (JCSG 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 11243))

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Abstract

A large number of games are available to students and instructors that aid in developing a basic understanding of how to read and write programs. In this paper we review the existing serious programming game literature and examine the educational content and game evaluations of 49 games. First, we assess all games with respect to the programming fundamentals specified in the ACM 2013 Computer Science Curricula guidelines. Next, we review how each game is evaluated with respect to likability, accessibility, learning effect and engagement. In addition to the evaluated research questions, we also review the research methods used in the evaluations. Based on the results of our survey we conclude by identifying a number of open problems in the serious programming games literature.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Commercial sources such as the iOS game store, Google Play Store, HourOfCode.com, and Tynker.com offer over 100 different programming games, typically aimed at children. However, many of these games follow a similar approach or share visual programming environments. We chose to only include a small sample from these websites due to the high degree of game overlap and similarity.

  2. 2.

    Serious games with evaluations are primarily a subset of those that have accompanying research papers, technical reports or theses.

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Acknowledgment

This research was partially funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Ontario Institute of Technology, 2000 Simcoe St N, Oshawa, ON, L1H 7K4, Canada

    Michael A. Miljanovic & Jeremy S. Bradbury

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  1. Michael A. Miljanovic
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  2. Jeremy S. Bradbury
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jeremy S. Bradbury .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Stefan Göbel

  2. Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Augusto Garcia-Agundez

  3. Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Thomas Tregel

  4. Staffordshire University, Stoke on Trent, UK

    Minhua Ma

  5. University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

    Jannicke Baalsrud Hauge

  6. SINTEF Technology and Society, Trondheim, Norway

    Manuel Oliveira

  7. Griffith University, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

    Tim Marsh

  8. Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Polona Caserman

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Miljanovic, M.A., Bradbury, J.S. (2018). A Review of Serious Games for Programming. In: Göbel, S., et al. Serious Games. JCSG 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11243. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02762-9_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02762-9_21

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