Abstract:

Several professional and scientific articles point out that games are suitable as a motivational factor in learning. The effectiveness of learning, which is based on the creation of games, increases. Making a game itself is learning, and the effort to learn something is all the stronger if the game turns out to be interesting to other people. Part of teaching informatics and learning programming is not only playing educational games related to informatics, but also game programming. Designing and creating games in a specific programming language helps students learn informatics concepts and programming skills. What games are suitable for teaching Scratch programming to lower secondary school students? Pupils play graphically attractive games on the Internet, which are designed and prepared by a group of professional graphic designers and programmers. Thus, students naturally expect that after the end of the forty-five-minute lesson, they will have programmed their own, equally interesting and nice game. However, it is obvious that these student expectations cannot be adequately met in the short time of the lesson. When learning to program, logical games or such tasks are used, for which graphics are already prepared in advance in the Scratch environment. And in order for lower secondary school students to master programming, the algorithms contained in the game must be reasonably challenging for this age category of students. When choosing games that are used in teaching, it is necessary to take these assumptions into account. It is also important that the programming language chosen by the young programmer supports the development of games, i.e. that such tools are implemented in it that allow e.g. work with images and handle keyboard and mouse events. In our research, we will consider a game as a program that expects input from the user, i.e. e.g. clicking and dragging characters or controlling characters with keys. We will categorize these programs according to basic programming concepts, mathematical skills and the difficulty of algorithms for verifying the game's operating conditions. The advantage of the games we examined is that they were tested as programming assignments for preparing students for the competition or directly as tasks for the Scratch Cup competition. This will allow us to better estimate the time required to program the game and give evidence that the students were able to actively use IT concepts and skills to prepare the game in the Scratch environment.

Keywords:

Programming, games, lower secondary.