A Software Architecture for Developing Distributed Games that Teach Coding and Algorithmic Thinking

Abstract

This paper presents an architecture for building multi player games that aim to teach coding skills and promote algorithmic thinking. The main requirements for the architecture are to enable quick and affordable development and deployment, support commodity client devices, and enable multiplayer, com-petitive gameplay. By demonstrating an evaluation case study, we show how the proposed architecture achieves these requirements. At its core, it realizes a distributed model extending the client-server paradigm, where multiple players can independently train, then compete in a multiplayer mode using a shared, cloud-based server. While the architecture is validated with a specific maze-themed case study game, we argue that the main principles of this approach can be reused to a wider range of multi player, educational games.