Using an Online Serious Game to Teach Basic Programming Concepts and Facilitate Gameful Experiences for High School Students

Teaching programming to pre-university students has attracted a great deal of attention in the last years. The benefits of teaching programming before University have been investigated by taking several approaches to improve the students’ learning scores, motivation and satisfaction levels. Serious Games (SGs) are also gaining an increasing research interest for education. SGs can be defined as games designed for a primary goal other for than pure entertainment. In the case of this paper, the DFD-C serious game has been created to investigate whether High School students will improve their learning of programming fundamentals and, if there are gender differences in the improvement. Moreover, it is explored the perception of the gameful experience by the students when using a serious game such as DFD-C, and if this perception is different in the case of boys or girls. An experiment with 38 K-10 High School students has been carried out during the 2019–2020 academic year. All students took a pre-test at the beginning of the experiment. After that, they were randomly split into a control group (no use of DFD-C) and a test group (use of DFD-C). Finally, all of them took the same test (post-test) to measure their learning gains. The test group also completed the Gamefulquest questionnaire to evaluate their perception of the gameful experience. A significant improvement in the scores of the test students was registered, with no gender differences. Moreover, the answers to the Gamefulquest reveal that students had a positive gameful experience, being the ratings of the girls slightly higher than boys. It is concluded that using SGs to teach learning programming fundamentals to High School students increased their learning scores and students perceived the sense of playfulness, guidance and social experience of the SG without having significant differences between girls and boys.