An experimental evaluation of scaffolded educational games design for programming

The effectiveness of educational games design has been the issue of many researches in recent years to support Computer Science (CS) novices, especially in the context of learning introductory programming courses. This issue has been highlighted due to the difficulties faced by students in developing algorithms related to programming concept, program construction as well as understanding and applying programming control structures. To overcome the identified difficulties and improve teaching and learning of programming, a number of research works have proposed educational games to motivate and engage their novices. However, to our knowledge, past research had applied general scaffolding characteristics in their games, but none has adapted these characteristics in the context of educational games design. As a result, three scaffolded educational games design characteristics are adapted to be embedded into our games. As proof of concept, a number of puzzle-based educational games which focus on decision-making structures are redesigned and redeveloped for teaching and learning programming. To validate the design, an experiment is conducted to 30 CS novices, who are randomly assigned into control and experimental groups. The results showed the educational games design-scaffolding characteristics are perceivably effective in assisting CS novices in learning programming. Therefore, the findings suggest these scaffolding characteristics have successfully been embedded as an effective educational games design technique.