International audienceThis paper presents an experimental feedback on a serious game dedicated to strengthening programming skills. This serious game, called Prog&Play, is built on an open source real-time strategy game. Its goal is to be compatible with different students, teachers and institutions. We based its evaluation on an iterative process that allows to implement the game and carry out experimentations in several contexts. Through this assessment, we define a framework which has been tested by third parties and we analyse both positive and negative points in order to improve the project. Evaluation is indeed beneficial and enables you to establish communication about the implemented practices

Video games are part of our culture like TV, movies, and books. We believe that this kind of software can be used to increase students' interest in computer science. Video games with other goals than entertainment, serious games, are present, today, in several fields such as education, government, health, defence, industry, civil security, and science. This paper presents a study around a serious game dedicated to strengthening programming skills. Real-Time Strategy, which is a popular game genre, seems to be the most suitable kind of game to support such a serious game. From programming teaching features to video game characteristics, we define a teaching organisation to experiment if a serious game can be adapted to learn programming.

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Abstract. This paper deals with an analysis of a large-scale use of Prog&Play 5 , a game-based learning environment specially designed to teach the basics of programming to first year university students. The study relies mainly on a motivation survey completed by 182 students among 258 who used the serious game for 4 to 20 hours in seven different university settings. Our findings show that the students' interest for Prog&Play is not only related to the intrinsic game quality, it is also related to the teaching context and mainly to the course schedule and the way teachers organize sessions to benefit from the technology.

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