The Influence of Game-based Programming Education on the Algorithmic Thinking

Applied informatics engineering students of the undergraduate course Programming I get acquainted with the basic programming knowledge (structured programming) in C. Our earlier personal experiences in Higher Education showed that the majority of the students can not acquire the algorithmic thinking by following the traditional teaching process and they do not have too much chance to pass it. Our starting hypothesis was that the group where the students followed the game oriented exercises would achieve better results in the papers. After the semester we collected the paper results by groups and we tried to analyze whether this method was helpful or not for the students. The traditional way to teach programming for applied informatics engineering students was not so successful than the game-based examples. The students were more motivated to write game programs and more students could pass the test. It means by same learning material and test exercises the student who learned programming in game-based method could get more than one mark better paper results and pass the test in higher percent.