Experimental Feedback on Prog&Play: A Serious Game for Programming Practice

Abstract

International audienceThis paper presents an experimental feedback on a serious game dedicated to strengthening programming skills. This serious game, called Prog&Play, is built on an open source real-time strategy game. Its goal is to be compatible with different students, teachers and institutions. We based its evaluation on an iterative process that allows to implement the game and carry out experimentations in several contexts. Through this assessment, we define a framework which has been tested by third parties and we analyse both positive and negative points in order to improve the project. Evaluation is indeed beneficial and enables you to establish communication about the implemented practices

Learning Programming through Games and Contests: Overview, Characterisation and Discussion

“…One suggestion for recreating games is to modify an existing non-educational games into programming games (Muratet et al, 2010). The authors have used existing online non-educational games ideas to develop their own serious games.…”

“…moving, building, and so forth). So the authors (Muratet et al, 2010) changed the game design that the player has to write a program code in order to make the actions of his units and play. The authors modified some games into serious games and students, e.g.…”

“…Some platforms, e.g. Prog&Play may help even to recruit students in computer science (Muratet et al, 2010). Intervention of educational games in programming courses raises pass rates by 10.8% on average (Vihavainen et al, 2014).…”

“…Non-educational games may be gamified and used for teaching programming courses as well (Muratet et al, 2010). Contests and duels in programming games are engaging and may be used to raise programming skills (Cuba-Ricardo et al, 2015).…”

Addressing teachers' concerns about the Prog&Play serious game with context adaptation

“…Earlier quantitative studies (Muratet et al, 2011(Muratet et al, , 2012 suggested that workshop or project contexts of Prog&Play teaching settings were more beneficial for learners' satisfaction than regular lectures along with practice sessions. Our research questions are as follows:…”