Learning Games for Programming

Many scholars, talking about both educational games and general educational practice, argue that principles such as ‘agency’, ‘immersion’, ‘intrinsic motivation ’ and ‘fantasy ’ are paramount for the pupils to actively engage with the learning activity. Games have the power of stripping the pressure coming from judgement, evaluation, intra-classroom comparison and competition, creating a safe environment where the principles mentioned above can enable the player to undergo a deep and valuable learning experience. And yet, educational games often fall short when it comes to apply those principles and engage their players. Especially learning games that teach programming often lack immersive settings, are weak in terms of compelling game-play and sometimes even require prior knowledge of syntax or coding. The more that computers and programming have become a part of everyday life, the more a profound literacy in computer science has become necessary and therefore it should be introduced at an early age, using suitable visual metaphors and providing adequate intrinsic motivation. In this thesis we present the design and evaluation of a learning game based on the concept o