Learning to Program by Playing Learning Games

Game-based learning is an emerging field that has become a part of university education and several researchersdescribe its strong learning potential. For several subjects there is a rich flora of learning games and commercial-of-the-shelfgames available, but for programming education in general and Python programming in particular, the situation is different.There exists an economical aspect as well and to develop learning games for programming education, might not interest themainstream game industry and most universities do not have the resources needed to develop their own tailor-madelearning games. Digital gaming in general has had a fast expansion during the last decade and the generation that now isentering the universities has a habit of regular gaming. At the same time there are several studies reporting about lowmotivated students in introductory programming courses. In a time when commercial games for programming educationare rare, universities must look for affordable ways to construct appropriate learning games. This study has investigated theidea of using learning games developed by university students as additional learning tools in an introductory programmingcourse. Five student constructed games for learning to program in Python have been analysed. Eventually two learninggames were selected and tested as part of a five week introductory programming course. The overall strategy has beenaction research with the aim to improve an existing programming course. A group of students have played the games in twoworkshops where data has been collected in a mix of questionnaires, observations and group discussions. Findings indicatethat the general idea seems to work, but as for all kind of course content, there need to be a thorough assessment anditerative refinement. Despite some found bugs and interface flaws the games had a challenging gameplay as well as learningoutcomes. The game-based workshops also had a catalytic effect and created energy as well as curiosity among theparticipants. To what degree the games and the workshops contributed to concrete learning outcomes will be furtheranalysed after the second examination deadline