Game programming for improving learning experience

Abstract

In Computer Science Education there is a tendency to implement active learning paradigms where students are the focus of the educational process. An instantiation of these learning methods are gaming environments. We present ProGames, a system for learning programming skills through a leveled set of visually-attractive and interactive programming games in Greenfoot, categorized by student's likes offering them solutions to sets of problems that they really enjoy or like most. The system has been evaluated during the academic course 2012-13 in three Computer Science Degrees and our results indicate that using ProGames had a most positive influence in the students learning. Moreover, the subjective opinion of students reflects that they really enjoyed working with the system and increased the engagement with the course.