Abstract:

Learning computer programming is a long process. First of all, students have to be familiar with basic control structures: sequence, selection, and iteration. Furthermore, they also need to acquire experiences of using these three control structures as they solve more and more complicated tasks. Next, they need to learn the syntax of the chosen programming language, however, writing instructions of a computer program in a built-in text editor of the development environment might be boring for children. In this paper, we describe a more exciting way of introducing programming for young students. We review a few online games (e.g., LightBot, RoboZZle, Cargo-Bot) that can be used to get experiences with basic control structures. In these games, instead of simple programming assignments to write out something to the screen, students have to solve exciting tasks to control the movement of a robot. The textual representation of instructions are replaced with icons, so children can write programming codes easily by arranging different kinds of icons to the right order. In the article, we also compare the implementation of the basic control structures in these games, we compare the structure of the codes created in these games to the codes in C programming language, and we summarize the possibilities of using these online games in education.

Keywords:

Teaching programing, gamification, algorithmization.