Exploring Game Elements in Learning Programming: An Empirical Evaluation

The worldwide demand for software developers are increasing, however, students are facing problems to learn programming at universities. To make things worse, the failure and dropout rates are high, especially in introductory computer programming courses. To address this type of problem, new strategies have been proposed to engage students in programming courses. One strategy is to use game elements to learn programming. Game elements are important for the success or failure of an educational serious game. In the same way, the students' learning process may benefit from proper use of game elements. In this work, we aim to identify and evaluate which game elements contribute to the students' learning in programming education. We performed 19 user studies to investigate the impact on learning of game elements present in two serious games for learning programming. The study was carried out with students from introductory periods of the undergraduate program in Information Systems. Our results identify some game elements that have positive effect on learning programming. The students' feedback also indicates that game elements help them staying focused, engaged and that games are useful complementary resource for learning process.