K-12 game programming course concept using textual programming

Abstract

Several programming environments have been constructed to facilitate novice programming at K-12 and CS0/CS1 levels. The environments can be roughly divided into those using visual or textual programming. This paper presents a K-12 game programming course concept based on textual programming. The concept is based on an easy-to-use C# library, called Jypeli, built on top of Microsoft XNA Framework. The library tries to maintain advantages of visual programming and avoid challenges of textual programming. In particular, the library helps beginners to program their first games in a short period of time and without a heavy syntactic load. The course concept and an initial evaluation consisting of student feedback and a literature rationale are presented.