Building bridges between playing games and writing programs

Abstract

The research work disclosed in this publication is partially funded by the Endeavour Scholarship Scheme (Malta). Scholarships are part-financed by the European Union - European Social Fund (ESF) - Operational Programme II – Cohesion Policy 2014- 2020 “Investing in human capital to create more opportunities and promote the well-being of society”. This study investigates programming pedagogies whilst focusing on constructivist and constructionist teaching methods. It also examines the nature of games and how they can be used in programming education. The main objective of this study was to explore how teaching programming through creating mobile-based games can be beneficial to students to learn programming constructs and helpful to teachers to teach programming effectively. This was done by conducting a case study spanning over four sessions with novice programming students, based on a resource pack created specifically for this study. A similar case study was then conducted with Computing teachers to gather their professional perceptions about the resource pack, based on their experience in the field of teaching programming. The data gathered from the case studies, in the form of session transcriptions, games created by the students, observatory reports and transcriptions of interviews with the teacher conducting the workshops was analysed and discussed in the form of several themes that emerged during the course of the research. The researcher notes that student motivation increases when programming is presented in the form of coding a mobile-based game and that the students were able to become active participants in their own learning by doing the appropriate research, using models to build new work upon and ultimately investing time in game development. This research enabled students to learn programming concepts by creating mobile-based games. Most of the students showed that they comprehended the programing constructs of conditions, loops and procedures and were able, to some extent or other, to use this knowledge to create their own mobile-based games. This research enabled students to learn programming concepts by creating mobile-based games which they invented. From this study, it was also apparent that teachers are undecided about their preference of using a blocks-based language over a text-based language in class to teach programming concepts to their students. Although the teachers agreed that developing mobile-based games would be highly stimulating to their students, they were rather unsure whether students of different learning abilities would be able to cope with the complexities that can be present during programming such a game. Others voiced their concerns that grasping programming concepts would be difficult for students due to their lack of computational thinking skills and problem solving skills. Several recommendations to address these issues were made. These include a stronger framework for programming education as well as the opportunity that every person is able to develop computational thinking skills, even if they do not end up in the I.T. industry.