Increasing Intrinsic Motivation of Programming Students: Towards Fix and Play Educational Games

Abstract

Aim/Purpose: The objective of this research is to investigate the effectiveness of educational games on learning computer programming. In particular, we are examining whether allowing students to manipulate the underlying code of the educational games will increase their intrinsic motivation. Background: Young students are fond of playing digital games. Moreover, they are also interested in creating game applications. We try to make use of both of these facts. Methodology: A prototype was created to teach the fundamentals of conditional structures. A number of errors were intentionally included in the game at different stages. Whenever an error is encountered, students have to stop the game and fix the bug before proceeding. A pilot study was conducted to evaluate this approach. Contribution: This research investigates a novel approach to teach programming using educational games. This study is at the initial stage. Findings: Allowing the programming students to manipulate the underlying code of the educational game they play will increase their intrinsic motivation. Recommendations for Practitioners: Creating educational games to teach programming, and systematically allowing the players to manipulate the gaming logic, will be beneficial to the students. Recommendation for Researchers: This research can be extended to investigate how various artificial intelligence techniques can be used to model the gamers, for example, skill level. Impact on Society: The future generations of students should be able to use digital technologies proficiently. In addition, they should also be able to understand and modify the underlying code in the digital things (like Internet of Things).This research attempts to alleviate the disenchantment associated with learning coding. Future Research: A full scale evaluation – including objective evaluation using game scores – will be conducted. One-way MANOVA will be used to analyze the efficacy of the proposed intervention on the students’ performance, and their intrinsic motivation and flow experience.

Gamified Digital Game-Based Learning as a Pedagogical Strategy: Student Academic Performance and Motivation

“…According to [55] and the author's self-determination theory, intrinsic motivation increases engagement and performance more effectively than extrinsic motivation. When learners enjoy the internal logic [18] or the dynamics of the game, learning is experienced as an enjoyable situation, so intrinsic motivation increases [56]. Using the mechanics of how games work, such as levels, points, leaderboards and a competitive environment, can increase students' external and internal motivation to participate in these learning situations.…”

Shoot2Learn: Fix-and-Play Educational Game for Learning Programming; Enhancing Student Engagement by Mixing Game Playing and Game Programming

“…We created a simple fix-and-play shooting game Shoot2Learn to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. A pilot study was conducted earlier, and the results were published (Mohanarajah, 2018). Recently, we conducted a quasiexperimental study in real classroom settings at two universities, one each from the countries USA (say US-U) and Sri Lanka (say SL-U).…”