Learning to Program by Building Learning Games

Digital games and digital gaming have had a fast expansion in the 21st century and today the vast majority play some kind of digital games. From a teacher’s perspective an interesting type of games are the so called learning games and the didactic idea of Game-based learning (GBL). In the last decade GBL has been an emerging field and several researchers have pointed out its strong learning potential. The aim of this study is to describe and discuss the idea of learning to program by game construction. The overall research strategy has been action research where the case study approach has been combined with a content analysis of submitted learning games. Data has been collected from course evaluation questionnaires, postings in online discussion fora and game analyses. Involved informants have been kept totally anonymous and game analyses are also presented with respect for personal integrity. Findings show that game construction can be an appreciated as well as stimulating way of designing course assignments, especially in programming courses involving multimedia and graphical user interfaces. The quality of students’ submissions show a wide variety and are strongly dependent on students pre-knowledge. Some of the student built learning games were found to have a potential for reuse as additional learning tools in introductory programming courses. However, to what degree and how needs to be assessed in a future study.