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Problem-solving skills can make students more autonomous in their learning in addition to contributing to the individual's success in real-life situations (professionally or personally). In this sense, Computational Thinking, as a problem-solving approach that can involve information technologies, can contribute a lot to this subject. Therefore, due to its essence, the development of Computer Science concepts is closely related to the employment of problem-solving activities. However, teachers may face difficulties when proposing Computational Thinking problem-solving activities to their students. This paper proposes the engineering of a software that aims to allow teachers to generate challenges related to game and interactive animations programming to support their classes. The problems generated by the system, do not limit the learners' creative power. Besides that, teachers can balance the reasoning component of the challenges according to the learners' level of knowledge in programming and algorithms. An experiment with Computational Thinking workshops was analyzed in order to design the proposed software.

The field of computing has not been a popular area of study for young women entering the University of Brasilia (UnB). In 2015, female students comprised a mere 5% of the students seeking to enroll in a Computer Engineering major. In an effort to popularize the field of Computer Science among girls in High School, the Meninas.comp Project (Girls.comp, in English) is being carried out in the public high schools of Brasfla, in Brazil. The project is coordinated by female professors from the Department of Computer Sciences at the UnB. This article reports on one of the activities of this project, presenting the hands-on workshop with programming for public high schools. These programming workshops are attended by students from 10th, 11th and 12th grades. The workshops include game programming, robotics and developing apps for mobile phone.

In game development, mechanics are one of the basis of the entertainment experience. However, the cost of implementing, improving, and refactoring economy mechanics is high because solutions cannot be easily reused across products. We argue that a reference architecture reduces this cost by providing knowledge reuse in addition to software reuse. To achieve that, we designed Unlimited Rulebook, a reference architecture for economy subsystems in games. It builds on established techniques such as Predicate Dispatching, the Entity-Component-System pattern, and the Adaptive Object-Model architectural style to facilitate the addition and modification of entity types and mechanics to the game while reducing the cost of changing existing code. We evaluated this cost reduction empirically via quasi-experiments with university students in two game programming courses.

The game of life, a cellular automation model, is based on the principles of emergence and self-organization. It is a zero-player game that plays out on the basis of its initial state only with the help of some simple rules. It is an infinite computational process which may generate complex patterns over time. In this paper, we propose and compare 2 different methods along with their architectures to optimize the functioning of the existing method. The first method uses OpenMP which works on the fundamentals of shared memory architecture whereas the second method uses MPI which in turn uses message passing techniques on distributed memory systems.

We are developing a high-level synthesizable software game library to realize high performance and low power mobile terminals executing game applications. High-level synthesis, HLS, is a technology that automatically converts software into hardware. Games developed by HLS oriented game software library are executed by high-speed and low-power hardware reconfigured on reconfigurable devices in mobile terminals. This paper develops a circle drawing processing as one of functions in HLS oriented game software library. We employ Michener's algorithm which is suitable for hardware implementation as a circle drawing algorithm because it just consists of simple integer operations. We also show the program description method so that HLS tool can convert the circle drawing processing based on Michener's algorithm to a good hardware module. The experiments evaluate the execution time and the amount of hardware of the hardware module HLS generated.

In the last years, many didactic activities have been proposed to develop Computational Thinking (CT) skills in children and adolescents. Among these activities, the digital game programming stands out as a promising alternative considering that it is related to a familiar and motivating context for students. These initiatives are not specifically aimed at individuals with special needs such as the autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Children and adolescents with ASD usually have some limitations related to communication, cognitive flexibility, and interpersonal relationships. However, it seems natural that the skills potentially developed through game programming activities are especially beneficial for the public with ASD. In this paper, we describe the offering and evaluation of a Game Building Workshop adapted to adolescents with this condition. The guidelines used to define the workshop activities are described. An assessment based on the classroom observation and analysis of produced artifacts indicate that the participants acquired CT skills related to programming at a high level. In addition, the collaborative nature of the activities offered a stimulating and welcoming environment for individuals with ASD.

In collaborative development of games software, hotspot identification technique significantly supports maintenance and evolutions activities including modding because newly involved developers must identify hotspot. This paper focuses on game loops as hotspots because many action games, including classic action games and the latest action games for console game machines, have an architecture consisting of game loops and update functions. This study assumes that game loops and update functions have the largest number of function calls in the entire source code modules. This paper investigates whether call flow analysis helps developers identify hotspots in four games software publicly accessible in GitHub. The results of the investigation revealed that one game loop and a set of update functions could be identified precisely by call flow analysis and that other three neighborhood functions could be identified. The results showed the possibility of automated identification of game loop and update functions by call flow analysis.

Video game programming is an area where code duplication is extremely prevalent. Similar types of tasks are performed in multiple places throughout a game engine codebase. For example: game balance, logging, and memory allocation are just a few of the areas which are located across disparate locations of the codebase. Meanwhile, aspect oriented programming (AOP) was created to make use of common themes in a codebase and allow for advice to be given during compilation or runtime. GAMESPECT is a Domain Specific language (DSL) which resides in a higher level language space, above the typical languages used by game engines such as Unreal Engine 4. The language is written with the popular XText language toolset and contains advices in the spirit of aspect oriented programming: point cuts and join points. These advices can be executed at runtime when the programmer wants to finetune values or perform debugging. The advising is made possible through the Clang toolchain. Unique to this approach, GAMESPECT takes a source language and converts into multiple target languages. Depending on the context, GAMESPECT can generate C++, LUA, Blueprints or Skookum Script. This type of source to source translation is made possible through GAMESPECT’s “composition specifications”. With GAMESPECT, video game designers can increase their productivity and reduce the required lines of code for certain tasks by a 9–40% reduction. In addition, it provides for an AOP platform which is agnostic to the underlying game code. The applicability of this approach extends beyond game programming into software engineering as a whole.

Several types of Text Messaging (TM) games are available today. They explored different types of games genres, categories and platforms, such as Short Messaging Service (SMS) competitions and text-based adventures on Instant Messaging (IM) bots. This paper presents IMgine, a game engine able to provide TM games across distinct IM platforms. It implements game engine routines in a configured game loop for multiple IM platforms, capable of representing TM game states and logic by the execution of predefined game functions. As validation process, IM games were developed to show the IMgine capability of providing game mechanics and dynamics aspects according to TM and IM restrictions. As a result, a foundation for IM games that organizes the definition of TM game states and logic is provided, allowing game developers to be concerned with the game core implementation instead of IM transmission process or TM interaction limits.

One of the goals of modern game programming is adapting the life-like characteristics and concepts into games. This approach is adopted to offer game agents that exhibit more engaging behavior. Methods that prioritize reward maximization cause the game agent to go into same patterns and lead to repetitive gaming experience, as well as reduced playability. In order to prevent such repetitive patterns, we explore a behavior algorithm based on Q-learning with a Naive Bayes approach. The algorithm is validated in a formal user study in contrast to a benchmark. The results of the study demonstrate that the algorithm outperforms the benchmark and the game agent becomes more engaging as the amount of gameplay data, from which the algorithm learns, increases.

Primary school's programming courses for children are made up of software [1] courses and hardware courses. In the six semester, after summing up the teaching results, we found that the cultivation of computer thinking for primary school students, interest in training, could begin from elementary school. In the course of the lecture, there are many real-life knowledge: RFID cards, radar ranging, smart street lights, intelligent traffic lights, remote control, game programming, etc. While playing, I learned basic physics and mathematics, and learned computer programming knowledge. This paper summarizes the contents of the course and sorts out a set of courseware and experiment contents that are suitable for primary school students to develop computer programming.

Close to 100% employment of students and easy access to abundance of information on Internet has essentially changed student's learning practices and their earlier knowledge background, especially on rapidly progressing field of Software Engineering. On workplace they have to use technologies, which are used in practice of their employing enterprise, but often do not understand the scientific and/or technological principles on which these technologies are based. They seek explanations on Internet, but information on Internet is often low quality, one-sided and presented with business targets on mind — to get more users to technologies developed and sold by a business enterprise. Thus university has to explain basic principles of technologies what students already know and have used and correct some popular beliefs, which are supported by software vendors and based their business interests. Non-formal sources of knowledge — workplace training and Internet — do not reduce teacher's task, but force teachers constantly study all new which appears in this field, thus increase teachers workload. Students increasing use of non-formal sources of knowledge imply need for flipping the process — instead of teaching students are set to learn from provided detailed tutorials. Use of Internet and work has made self-study, seeking information from Internet sources very customary for current students, thus such flipping worked very well in a game programming course provided by the first author.

The integration of programming into the school curriculum has become increasingly important, especially in places and class levels where computer science is not yet available as a subject of its own. In this paper we investigate the performance of a class of sixth grade students who were trained in programming as part of their regular mathematics curriculum following the method of Forster [ACM SIGITE'16], which uses programming as a teaching tool for geometry skills. As a final project the students were tasked to program a computer game in Scratch, by which we gauge the students programming skills using the methodology proposed by Funke et al. [IEEE EDUCON'17], as well as the automatic quality assessment tool Dr. Scratch. We compare our results with the results reported by Funke et al. from over 50 students, and with the automatic quality assessment scores of a data set of 250K Scratch programs published by Aivaloglou et al. [MSR'17]. Our pilot study shows that introductory programming skills taught as part of mathematics classes, aiming at the improvement of geometry skills, also satisfy the computer science requirements of an introductory programming course.

For imitation learning in games, AI programs commonly learn thinking and evaluating methods from professional players' game records. However, compared to the total number of all possible game states, top players' records are extremely insufficient. The limited amount of high-quality learning materials may become the bottleneck of training artificial intelligence. We proposed to introduce the idea of Generative Adversarial Networks into game programming, and validated its effectiveness in playing Shogi, a Japanese Chess game. The proposed method is experimentally proved to be capable to alleviate the data insufficiency problem and build more competitive AI programs than conventional supervised training methods.

As of the early 20th century, a significant body of research has been published that shows how effective game-based learning and gamification techniques can be compared to other methods. However, creating games can be time consuming and usually demands a significant effort. Therefore, this paper focuses on the design and development of a novel framework for the rapid design of body-motion-based customizable game-like applications. This framework consists of two components: i) an interface that allows the user to design the game and capture the motion data, and ii) a customizable game for learning and training using off-the-shelf motion capture sensors like the Microsoft Kinect. The game is automatically configured based on the output of the game design interface. In order to evaluate the proposed system, a pilot use case for the Latin dance Salsa has been selected. Preliminary small-scaled experiments with latin dance students have shown the great potential of the proposed application.

Software process for game development is a self-improvement method that drives a software game developer to control, manage and improve the work. This is a structured framework of guidelines, forms and procedures for software development. Otherwise, there is no existing of particular software process profile for game development projects. Our work focus on the software development models for software game development. Particularly, our approach is to establish the basic profile of software process model that is suitable for software game development. Our research methodology is to establish a case study of game development project that is about Virtual Reality game for players to learn about Thai Etiquette and Customs. It is aimed to support foreigners who visit Thailand and go to attraction places. The proposed basic profile is applied to allow the game builders learning how to develop the software game projects. The evaluation of the proposed basic profile is performed by observation, questionnaire, and interviewing.

In recent years, teaching and learning process for all educational levels has been reformed in order to rapid growth of technological learning and a variety of tools. Educational computer game, which is one of effective tools, has been used for supporting teaching and learning in various subjects. Therefore, this study developed digital game named CPGame for simulating the compiler working with situation in human daily life in C programming language learning. The developed game was implemented with fifty-university learners to evaluate whether and how the learners with different achieving levels are motivated to learn C programming language through playing the C programming game. The experimental data was analyzed by using MANOVA and found that both high- and low-achieving learners are motivated to learn the topic through the developed game.

Multiplayer Online Battle Arena or MOBA is one of the most popular game types at the present. The MOBA games have been developed from Real Time Strategy (RTS) games. The goal of MOBA games is to destroy the enemy main base or to get points by killing the enemy members up to the required number. Players of MOBA games usually practice their game skills by playing with a bot. As creating a bot is difficult and rather complex, therefore this paper proposes an idea to develop a distributed simulation system for training game coding and testing game codes by displaying results in a mini map (2-D map). A MOBA game API is also provided for cooperating with the simulation software and so is software supporting many users for their bot programming. In addition, users can use this software to test their bot codes or to practice bot programming in a unique style launched by their own idea and to see the results from the monitor. The software can also introduce a playing plan from the code that the user has already programmed.

Leaning by game can promote the students' learning motivation. Educational game design involves programming competence, visual design and educational profession. Nevertheless, most of the teachers do not have the programming skills. At the same time, almost of game development tools are not designed for educational use. As a result, the purpose of this study is to develop an educational game authoring system for helping the teachers to design web-based instructional game for their students. A monopoly game project designed by this system is presented and verified for assessing the suitability of this authoring tool.

A platform of online bridge card game is designed for computer games in this paper. To implement a real-time platform for sharing information, we use TCP/IP network transport protocol to realize it, and data for transmission is very few. MFC development framework is used for programming. By using the platform, it is easy to develop other game platform and AI programs in a short time. So the research of game platform has some reference significance to the development of the computer games.

Video Games have become a core part of life for many and the industry is making millions. Video game principles are used in virtual reality and training scenarios for military applications. Courses in video Games are something that colleges should look into making. This paper is intended to be a course outline of an introductory course for students seeking to enter the industry.

This paper introduces a contemporary platform, called FGAWeb, that can be utilized in order to administrate flexible games. FGAWeb platform is focused on differentiating the content of puzzle and quiz games in order to make them more suitable for use in educational settings. Instructors can utilize this platform in order to create and edit game activities as well as, to have access to game and learning analytics. FGAWeb platform offers an API that makes the whole system accessible from any game engine that supports the HTTP protocol for data transfers.

Using automation to ensure reliability of a tricky card based game application is not a child's play, especially when the underlying engine is cocos-2dx, which is the world's no. 1 open-source and a cross-platform game development platform. This paper explores the challenges that can be faced while automating a game developed using cocos-2dx, such as dynamic rendering of game elements, overcoming the limitations in using automation tools like selenium in the absence of any locators to identify the visible or active elements to perform any operation. This paper further discusses the approach to bring efficient, generic and re-usable solution for these challenges while automating a multiplayer card game developed using cocos-2dx. This multi-layered approach spans across the following areas: 1) The mechanism for working and communicating with cocos-2dx web and native game client. 2) Approach for automating multiplayer game using FSM. 3) Automating the game play based on game rules which follows a heuristic approach. The benefit of this automation approach is that it makes the code 'device agnostic, which helps to run the same code against multiple devices of varying screen size and resolutions. This approach also makes the code robust, reducing any false failures since the interaction with the client is done via Javascript, which lot of UI automation tool still does not guarantee.

This study is based on an iterative, participatory design investigation that we are conducting in order to create digital games that could be flexibly re-designed by players, without requiring programming knowledge. In particular we focus on digital game development, both design andimplementation, for primary school pupils and their teachers. We propose a scenario where digital game development is mediated by tinkering with paper prototypes similar to board games. We address the problems of making sense and expressing rules of a digital game without programming. Analysis of our latest participatory workshop offers evidence that a board game can work as a tangible model of the computation happening in a digital game. Children understand the practice of designing games mainly as manipulation of features and behaviors of the visual elements of a game. We attempt at looking beyond visual programming, and rely instead on a tangible model of gamessupported by a minimalistic domain-specific language.

In the last decade, the gaming industry has grown greatly in scale, and many companies around the globe are now developing games. The development of these games uses some common functionality, including the implementation of graphics rendering, artificial intelligence, sound, video, physics and network capability. Implementation of these functionalities requires high levels of skill, resources and time. To overcome these issues, such core functions are built and bundled together in the form of a game engine. A game engine provides the basic framework for developing games. All engines include the aforementioned common functions, but each engine has pros and cons. So, to choose a suitable engine, a thorough study of the attributes of the various engines is required. Choosing the appropriate engine for a specific gaming application is not straightforward. The games being developed today have big budgets, and the selection of the wrong gaming engine can lead to big financial loses, as the product developed may not be up to standards due to lack of features in the selected engine. It is therefore necessary to have a framework to help pick the right engine. In recent years, a number of game engine selection methodology paradigms have been proposed, but these have certain limitations and weaknesses. The purpose of this paper is to propose a more robust framework to help game analysts and developers identify the best available game engine for serious games and gamified applications.

Traditional way of learning programming is often tedious and fearsome to students, especially to kids. In most cases this results reluctance and uptake, while programming is the core of modern technology. Game is the signature of immersion. With its intense power of engaging players, it can wipe out the aversion and motivate students on coding. Here we have described a better way of learning programming with digital game. We have developed a cross platform game that provides a role playing game design for the player, at the same time a kinesthetic approach to reinforce the basic concepts of programming.

This paper describes our experiences in developing multidisciplinary Wow experiences to boost business for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Wow experiences — outstandingly positive user experiences — are an increasingly important design target in product and service development contexts because they can help reveal customer needs. The basic idea in our Wow approach is to bring together various disciplines and companies from different fields. Linguistic elements and language tools, virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR), and game programming are examples of technologies that can be adapted for multiple fields. Our approach will also illustrate our strategies to utilize students' capabilities as an important factor in our RDI and business development. Our experiences will be concretized with examples of case studies that include versatile application fields from manufacturing to interior design, health care, tourism, exhibition, and cultural heritage applications. In our ongoing projects, we are carrying out fast experimentations to study how SMEs can utilize digital Wow effects to enhance product presentations, marketing, engineering applications, and other areas.

The use of computer based games for education can improve the learning process. The design of computer based games and the way the users might interact with them is an important and open issue as there are many possibilities and variables to take into account. This paper describes the design and evaluation of shopC, an educational computer board game driven by technology, based on the traditional well-known Monopoly game. Three different dimensions are considered: motivation, learning and gaming. We show the introduction and the evaluation of the game in a pilot study with 58 students from primary school interacting with the computer based game. This evaluation validates the design of the computer based game regarding the three dimensions (motivation, learning and gaming) and suggests a positive effect in the learning process.

This paper investigates the modification of an existing game console emulator utilizing scene recognition to perform audio-visual enhancement of vintage video games. Such games featured low-resolution graphics with limited colors and low-quality electronic music. Information contained about the virtual hardware state information is exploited to provide high-resolution, full-color graphics and a recorded soundtrack, complete with atmospheric effects, in real-time using the original game logic. The system developed as part of this research uses a modified version of the FCEUX emulator for the Nintendo Entertainment System. The system is capable of loading a commercially-released game, marking scenes for later recognition, mapping scenes to audio-visual events, and recognizing those scenes to enable those events. The result is an immersive game experience that far exceeds what was possible in the original game hardware.

Parkinson's Disease patients attending traditional long-term rehabilitation programs may lose interest and eventually drop out, as a direct result of the repeatability of the prescribed exercises. Technology-supported opportunities in the form of character-based, virtual reality exercise games (called “exergames”) can engage players to train in a non-linear fashion by providing an experience which varies from one game loop the next. The present work reports on a Kinect-based Unity3D exergame tailored to PD patients with mild to moderate symptoms which can be used in both clinical and home settings. The game supports a collection of gestures drawn from existing PD-specific training programs which advocate big and purposeful movements, intended to improve postural stability and reflexes as well as increase the overall mobility of upper and lower limbs. When a patient's movements “match” a programmed gesture, a 3D cartoon avatar responds accordingly. Finally, in-game decision-making purports to improve the patient's cognitive reaction.

Gamification and in particular game-based learning is significantly gaining ground during the latest decades. It expresses a different approach to education that is mixing education with gaming, aiming to enhance the learning experience with game mechanics and rules and to provide stronger motivations for lifelong learning. Many works have illustrated the benefits of learning while playing. This work presents such a game-based approach that has been adopted and used in the development of an online multiplayer platform game, with a purpose to teach or train programming with JavaScript. In effect it is like what is usually called a serious game, or a game with a purpose. The game, jLegends, is online and available for everyone to train and test knowledge on programming and logic, within a role-playing gaming approach. jLegends is built with source-code scalability in mind, in order to be expandable or even become open-sourced in the future.

the Chinese chess of the computer games is an important research field in the artificial intelligence which is extremely challenging and popullar. The relative research provides huge contributions to the development of the artificial intelligence. In the paper, a complete computer games system is designed in the pratical situation. The system uses a variety of methods to improve the search game algorithms which belongs to the game system and gains a new and advanced search algorithm. The comparison results of the experiments shows that the advanced search algorithm is effective and practical in the computer games.

The programming teaching in the primary education is a paramount necessity. However, learning computational concepts has several challenges. In this scope, this study evaluates the application of game programming teaching video classes with students of K-12 education. In this context, a case study was conducted in the second semester of 2015 with 60 students that have participated in an online game programming challenge and the results suggest that the adoption of the proposed strategy is beneficial to the programming learning and can help attract new talent to computing and work the vocational awakening of young people.

Through the study of various problems in the elimination game, with unity 3D technology which has the advantages of convenient interactive graphical development environment and the cross-platform features, and C# scripting language is simple, safety, efficient, this paper carefully investigated and described the candy elimination of categories in mobile Android game algorithm design, AI design and the game development process. To achieve the level of the game options, multiple candy elimination, special effects, scores of statistics, and other functions. For the development of such games or other games with a certain guidance and reference.

This paper describes the development of an educational adventure game which aims to be useful in learning arithmetic. The main game platform communicates with several arithmetic mini games. A student modeling component is used to create a profile for every student and grant adaptive features to the main game platform. Additionally, an error diagnosis component is also useful for evaluating students' errors and giving relative advice. The choice of adventure game genre was based to past research which revealed that adventure games can have beneficial effects in learning process.

This paper analyzes the traditional game system, pointing out its shortcoming and putting forward an idea of designing a Distributed System (which is referred to as DS) Computer Game Platform. At first, the paper puts forward the structure of DS computer game platform and introduces several functions. After that, the paper proves the practicability of DS computer game system in several different aspects such as the technological principles, running processes and architectural design. Finally, comparing with the traditional form of playing computer game, the paper proves that the DS Computer Game Platform can be more powerful and efficient.

We analyzed common game design patterns such as enemy, weapon, communication, and creative control as well as social interaction and explored design patterns that are applicable to these game design patterns. The reusability, maintainability, and quality of game development are supposed to be improved and game development is able to adapt to constant changing and evolutionary game building process. Although some design patterns are discussed, other design patterns might suitable as well because game programming is too complicated to separate and apply each pattern independently.

Taking the game of Chinese army chess as the research object, in the Windows platform, using C# language and the custom control technologies of Winform, a personalized man-machine game system of Chinese army chess with several levels of intelligence is designed and implemented. In the system, besides the conventional functions such as registration, login, game interface, helps, and version information, there also include the war record interface, game player head image setting, timing, and the game player interfaces recording. Thus, according to their own preferences, the players them self can select background music and chess rules, can search the current situation, and can play with different computers. The experiments show that the system is feasible and effective.

As a rarity of Tibetan national culture, the Tibetan-go is dying out. In order to protect and popularize this unique culture, this paper designed a Tibetan-go human-computer game software. This software is composed of board representation, movement generator, searching engine and situation evaluation modules. The Tibetan-go human-computer game is realized by c programming language. We made test between a you-dan player and the software, the data showed that the software has the basic playing skills.

An intelligent computer games online system is designed and implemented based on c/s model with the function of the human-computer and human-human games. In order to solve the problem of the low search efficiency of connect5 game, many improvements are proposed in the paper. In the aspect of the network communication, the Socket technology is applied with the Twisted framework based on the event driven. According to many experimental data and results, the provided system online is demonstrated to be feasible and effective in connect5 game.

Nowadays, different serious game projects help the teaching-learning process of Object Oriented Programming (OOP) or Software Engineering (SE) concepts, but none of these projects are doing an integration of both fields for knowledge to children. The research presented in this paper proposes a serious game to help comprehension of basic concepts and attributes of OOP and SE to promote teaching-learning process of these concepts for children older than eight years old through Android devices.

Video games have grown in popularity since the 1980's. The largest consumers of video games are youth populations. Previous research has shown cognitive development and learning principles in video games. As a result, there is an increasing interest in games being teaching tools. Gamification is the use of video game elements in non-game applications. In this paper, I proposed a design to a study of applying gamification to a computer programming software, VENVI, in order to promote motivation, engagement, and computational thinking.

Programming for beginners is becoming increasingly more difficult to understand since most innovative tools immediately throw students into an environment where they must build everything in a program from nothing with inconsequential programming skills and little knowledge of programming concepts. As programming based careers are rising in demand, it is important to help the beginner programmers bridge the gap between understanding a program and developing one. Robot Chronicle offers a solution to this dilemma through a different approach than common state machines such as Scratch, Alice, Playmaker, and Code Spells and introduces the basic concepts of programming through a puzzle-based video game.

Currently, games have an important impact on areas other than entertainment. Researchers have demonstrated that games have the potential for creating learning environments toward the improved attainment of educational and training goals. Suitable, clear and easy-to-follow guidelines need to be implemented, especially for the creation of e-learning games for children, to increase the expected benefits of game-based learning (GBL). In this paper, a comprehensive set of guidelines is proposed along with a detailed explanation of each guideline. The proposed set of GBL guidelines can be used with an expert evaluation method to identify possible problems in learning objectives, game designs, user interfaces, and child requirements in the early phases of a game project. This set of guidelines, though mainly targeted at the pre-production of a GBL, can be utilized in post-production phases.

Children today grow up in an exciting and changing world where the web technology, Internet, mobile phones, video games and computers surround all aspects of their daily lives. These digital technologies, in particular video games, have provided new opportunities for these kids to play, communicate with others, foster their imagination and also enhance their educational performance. Unfortunately, this can be a little more different for deaf and hard of hearing children, whose native language is Sign Language (SL). The most existing video games are not geared to the unique need of these hearing disabled: there have been, even timidly, few attempts that focusing on the development of accessible educational games that could meet the requirements necessary for deaf gamers and improve their educational potential. In this context, we present in this paper a design for an interactive game generator of an accessible and effective educational game target towards the deaf and hard of hearing children. The game is called MemoSign, it federates the use of the famous memory game and a 3D signing avatar to support learning the SL notation system SignWriting. The main goal of designing such game generator is to help teachers, even parents, to create many instances of MemoSign, in few steps without any programming language knowledge, with a view to foster and promote the vocabulary acquisition for deaf learners in both signed and spoken languages.

Recently, games have started to be used in the educational field to teach different subjects. In fact, according to different research works, educational games have made learners more motivated and interested in learning. At the same time, learning analytics is gaining an increasing attention because it supports evaluating the learner, the given courses and the learning environment. This paper presents a newly designed educational game for teaching computer architecture subject. Learning analytics was used to evaluate the game. The obtained results showed that: (1) The game is efficient in teaching computer architecture subject. (2) Further support for female learners is needed during the learning-playing process. (3) Some of the game learning activities require further design enhancement to be noticeable by learners during the learning-playing process. (4) Further motivational game elements are needed during the learning-playing process.

In this paper we present a mobile game designed specifically to support the learning of the arithmetic polynomial operations. We describe the characteristics of the game and we state and discuss the reasons behind the choices made in the development of the game.

[Context] The inclusion of programming concepts in high school education has been emerging, since applying computing in high school education is a way to motivate and prepare students into the field of technology. [Objective] This work evaluates the teaching programming games for high school students based on different forms of distance education (online video lessons, broadcasted live or recorded, and tutorials in PDF). [Method] A case study was performed in the second half of 2014 with 30 high school students enrolled in an online game programming challenge. The students had access to the different formats of online lessons and they were monitored by tutors in a online learning environment. [Results] Over 75% of the students performed and sent all the activities requested in the study, suggesting that all investigated online formats are effective. However, 85% of students indicated their preference to use recorded video classes to learn programming. Finally, 100% of the students said that they would participate again in such challenge, showing the attractiveness of the game development. [Conclusions] We considered that online formats (specially recorded video) can be used to promote the development of games to introduce programming knowledge in high school education. However, the lessons learned (difficults found and improvement suggestions) should be taken in consideration to implement online solutions in large scale.

Game-based learning is considered as a very motivational tool to accelerate active learning of students. As such learning environments usually follow a computer-assisted instruction concept that offers no adaptability to each student, some idea from Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) are borrowed and applied in educational games to teach introductory programming. Thus, we developed a Game-based Intelligent Tutoring System (GITS) in the form of a competitive board game. The board game revises the classic table game "Snakes and Ladders" to improve web-based problem solving skills and learning computer programming. Moreover, a mini-game, tic-tac-toe quiz, is applied in GITS to update the Bayesian network used for the process of decision-making in our proposed system. Our future work is to evaluate the GITS by conducting an experimental study using novices.