About the Effectiveness of Different Game Design Elements for an Introductory Programming Course.
Autoren: Schwarzmann Andreas, Landes Dieter, Sedelmaier Yvonne
Autoren: Schwarzmann Andreas, Landes Dieter, Sedelmaier Yvonne
Abstract—
Learning a programming language is a fundamental part of nearly every technical study program. Nevertheless, even students of computer science face challenges before they master sufficient programming skills. Therefore, learning to program computers is tough especially for non-computer science students. A highly promising approach towards alleviating this problem is the integration of game design elements in a non-game context in order to improve user engagement. Gamification comes along with a variety of game elements with different and unclear motivational impact. Consequently, this paper aims at identifying those game elements which tend to be suitable for an introductory programming course. To do so, the potential relationship between game fea- tures and intrinsic motivation will be examined first. Subsequently, a collection of game features will be analyzed to meet predefined selection criteria. As a re- sult, the work revealed a set of competence related game features that are likely to fit better to a course for programming than other types of features.