Serious games for learning programming languages

In recent years, so-called serious games, where some kind of knowledge is gained through digital game play, have received significant attention and there has been an active movement toward games that effectively enrich the learning environment. Serious games are games that are developed according to the concept, “It is possible through game play to obtain some kind of knowledge while having fun. Through these serious games, there has been an active movement toward fun learning using games in education at school and internal training at organizations. In contrast, at universities the level of learning programming differs significantly depending on the academic background of the student and there are issues with traditional programming education learning because the student does not feel enjoyment and is not interested in information engineering. As a countermeasure, teaching methods and teaching aids etc. have been cited as themes and learning through the utilization of serious games and game development has been proposed to tackle these themes. In this paper we propose and evaluate serious games for programming learning based on the concept “Learning programming through gaming”.