A systematic review on open educational games for programming learning and teaching

Abstract

One of the main barriers for Educational Game (EG) to properly fulfill the specific pedagogical, cultural and technical requirements that are often unique to each situation is the difficulty of reusing and adapting them to different educational contexts. In this sense, open EGs could facilitate reuse and adaptation, once they follow the openness principles. This paper provides a systematic review of Open Educational Games (OEG) designed specifically for teaching computer programming and computational logic. It has been identified that most authors find the issue of reusing and adapting EGs following the openness philosophy as very important, but even them fail to use open tools in game development. We conclude that most articles recommend using component-based development, reuse and adaptation, but reuse still does not happen in a practical sense. Also, the amount of studies on EGs for teaching programming is low in the scientific literature, and most open EGs available on the Internet are not documented nor have some associated published paper. Thus, reuse and adaptation may even occur, but without scientific documentation and publication.