Work in progress - A survey of popular game creation platforms used for computing education

Because of the large appeal of video games, many educators are introducing computing concepts through video game development. By teaching students through video game development, teachers have the opportunity to continuously engage students, and students have fun while learning. In this paper, we present a review of game development platforms that have been used as teaching tools. We survey the attributes of different game development environments as well as their pros and cons. We investigate each platform to determine the following metrics: the type of interface the platform uses (graphical, textual or both), the language used to program the game (if applicable), the level of the intended user, whether the platform provides a debugging mechanism, and whether it provides a sharing mechanism. This literature review can be used to assist future development of teaching materials that engage students in computing via game development. Index Terms – computer science education, game development platforms, introductory computer science, K12 computing education