Gaming With OOP Learn: A Mobile Serious Game to Learn Object-Oriented Programming

Abstract

Information Technology has proved to be important in various sectors of the economy, one of them being the education sector. Sophisticated equipment and advanced software applications have contributed to enhancing learning techniques across many universities around the world. Nowadays, youngsters’ interest in playing games has been on the rise whether it is for entertainment or non-entertainment purposes. Serious games take this advantage and prove to be effective in improving the learning environment and efficiency of the learning process. Hence, learners’ ability to learn new skills and the capacity for retention through game-based learning has found great success as opposed to the traditional learning method that tends to be boring. Object-Oriented programming has always been quite challenging for IT students. This work focuses on the development of a mobile serious game ‘Gaming With OOP Learn’ to teach Object-Oriented Programming concepts to undergraduate students and to have their teachers assess their performance and provide feedback as a means of improving their performance. Thorough information was gathered through a review of existing similar systems and the ACM guidelines for Object-Oriented Programming concepts have been taken into account when implementing the different games proposed in Gaming With OOP Learn.