Implementing a Serious Game for Computer Programming Subjects

Serious game has been introduced as an interactive tool to support teaching and learning. Serious game provides learning engagement, motivation, and constant feedback to improve the student’s problem-solving, analytical, logic and reasoning, planning and strategizing skills. These skills are aligned with the skills needed to learn computer programming subjects. However, implementing serious games for computer programming subjects is not easy. It needs to consider different factors such as the adaptability of the game, learning outcome, time and duration, and types of participation. This paper reviews three different implementations of a serious game, named WannaBee Coder, in subjects of IT students (and future students). WannaBee Coder is an educational adventure web-based game in which the student must fulfil an objective by successfully answering all the questions. The game is adaptive and can be implemented for different subjects without changing the codes. We evaluated the effectiveness of these three implementations in three main criteria, namely: participation rate, impact on performance, and student feedback. Based on the evaluation results, we found that serious games can help students improve their programming skills and can be used as an alternative approach to learn computer programming.