Abstract:

In the scope of Higher Education, students face many barriers arose from different causes, as insufficient prerequisites, socioeconomic factors or scarce interest and motivation. Usually, these factors can lead to high dropout rates in some specific careers, as happens in Information Technology (IT)-related courses. Some recent studies point out that the adoption of non-conventional teaching practices and attitudes, especially in the first semesters, can collaborate to change this scenario. Many of these practices try to bring students to the central focus of the process; some of them are worried about keeping them in this focal point – and some reach this goal adding fun in the learning process. By promoting ludic activities, it is expected that the amusement brought by them helps to motivate students without losing the effectiveness of the main learning objective.

In this sense, the goal of this paper is to present a 2D educational game for learning fundamental concepts of programming, whose narrative is based on a battle among robots and humans. Students are supposed to interact with characters through console instructions – in the virtual world, there are characters and items like robot enemies and electromechanical structures (as automated doors, moving platforms, lasers emitters and sensors), which are meant to be manipulated by programming codes. By presenting a ludic situation where students are kept motivated to use programming structures in a coherent manner through an easy-to-use classic 2D platform game environment, the Python Domination game constitutes an educational resource with high potential to be applied in different contexts of programming learning.

An experiment was carried out with a sample of 54 IT students from three different courses (Computer Science, System Analysis and Development, Digital Games), following a qualitative approach. The model MEEGA+ was applied together with a 5-level Likert-like scale survey. Results shown as very positive – the goal of offering a motivating educational game was achieved, according to students’ evaluation; during the gameplay, boss-challenge tests, mixed with choice questions about programming were presented to students, which were meant to correctly answer at least 60% of them in order to finish levels. Regarding to the perception of learning, according to the same survey, Python Domination achieved the objective of being a tool that assists in the learning process of programming fundamentals. Further work involves the improvement of some playability aspects, as well as to perform new experiments with bigger groups of IT students.

Keywords:

Open educational game, game-based learning, programming logic, open educational resources.