Don´t Hide the Code!: Empowering Novice and Beginner Programmers Using a HTML Game Editor

Novices and beginners have multiple motivations to learn how to program. The greatest hurdle for them to overcome is the intimidation of the code itself. Making the code easier to understand and operate on assists them in the task of learning to program. This paper reports on a novel HTML games editor interface for assisting novice and beginner programmers to create games for mobile devices. Visualising the results of their programming in the form of a game helped them overcome their initial anxiety. The HTML games editor was developed using a cycled evaluation study to best meet the novice and beginner users´ needs. The goal for novices and beginners to create a game suitable for playing on a mobile device in 1.5 hours was achieved.