Supporting CS1 Instructors: Design and Evaluation of a Game Generator

Abstract

Serious games have shown much promise in education, including in the teaching of programming. However, instructors who teach introductory programming often do not have the specialised skills to create serious games. One way to address this problem is to use domain-specific game generators to create customised games as needed. This paper presents the design and empirical evaluation of a prototype game generator tool - the Recursive Game Generator. 30 programming instructors evaluated the tool and found it useful (87%), easy to use and learn (80%); and were satisfied with the tool's effectiveness and efficiency. Their positive experiences suggest that such a higher-order tool has the potential to increase the adoption of serious games in programming education, and broadly meet the needs of a diverse audience of instructors.