A Serious Game to Teach Rudimentary Programming: Investigating Content Integration.

Computer programming is a fundamental, transferable, rudimentary skill, which is an essential component across many University level programmes including Computer Games Development/Technology, Computer Science and Software Engineering. Programming has a reputation for being a difficult subject requiring 10 years of education, study and training to transfer from novice to expert level with computer programming courses having a high dropout rate. This indicates that traditional teaching approaches may be insufficient in terms of engaging learners for a sufficient amount of time or may not prove to be educationally effective. Serious games have been empirically evaluated in a variety of educational and training areas and there are many examples of the application of serious games in programming education. It has however been noted by researchers that there is a lack of research performed in terms of how computer games are utilised in teaching with focus on acceptance by learners and the integration of the appropriate pedagogical content. This paper presents the first step in the development of a game to teach rudimentary programming concepts at Higher Education (HE) level. The paper will report on a survey of participants performed to investigate whether a computer game will be accepted by learners to teach rudimentary programming, what particular pedagogical content can be effectively incorporated into the game and what particular type of game is most preferred in terms of genre, graphical fidelity and format. The questionnaire will be utilised as a tool to produce a basic requirements specification for a computer game to teach programming concepts in a Computer Games Development/Technology programme in Higher Education at the University of the West of Scotland (UWS). Sixty-one participants in a Higher Education Computer Games Development/Technology programme completed the survey with some of the following interesting results: 75% of participants believed that a computer game to teach rudimentary programming would be a good idea. Participants stated that medium fidelity would be preferable and that it did not matter if the game was 2D or 3D. Some of the most difficult programming concepts were pointers and classes and a game could be most applicable in some of the following areas: objects, scope, functions, methods, conditional statements, while loops and switch statements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]