Evaluating Usability and Educational Effectiveness of a Serious Game for Programmers Using Alternative Interfaces and Types of Activities

This paper presents a serious game that has been developed for programmers aiming to analyze and examine the effectiveness and the perceived usability of two different game interfaces. This game presents a drag-and-drop interface and a classical typing interface and towards this approach, four different versions of the same game were developed. Each version of the game focuses on either creating a part of code or debugging (finding the errors in the code provided). The game enables the players to advance their programming skills and computational thinking by engaging them in problem-solving activities during the gameplay. This paper provides insight and focuses on the evaluation of different interfaces in a serious game that is developed for programmers and targets fundamental programming concepts.