Reflection is a critical aspect of the learning process. However, educational games tend to focus on supporting learning concepts rather than supporting reflection. While reflection occurs in educational games, the educational game design and research community can benefit from more knowledge of how to facilitate player reflection through game design. In this paper, we examine educational programming games and analyze how reflection is currently supported. We find that current approaches prioritize accuracy over the individual learning process and often only support reflection post-gameplay. Our analysis identifies common reflective features, and we develop a set of open areas for future work. We discuss these promising directions towards engaging the community in developing more mechanics for reflection in educational games.

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An increasingly common area of study in procedural content generation is the creation of level segments: short pieces that can be used to form larger levels. Previous work has used basic concatenation to form these larger levels. However, even if the segments themselves are completable and well-formed, concatenation can fail to produce levels that are completable and can cause broken in-game structures (e.g. malformed pipes in Mario). We show this with three tile-based games: a side-scrolling platformer, a vertical platformer, and a top-down roguelike. Additionally, we present a Markov chain and a tree search algorithm that finds a link between two level segments, which uses filters to ensure completability and unbroken in-game structures in the linked segments. We further show that these links work well for multi-segment levels. We find that this method reliably finds links between segments and is customizable to meet a designer's needs.

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