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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Understanding play traces resulting from the learner's activity in serious games is a challenged research area. Especially, when the serious game is characterized by a large state space and a large amount of free interactions, the play traces become complex and thus hard to analyze and to interpret by teachers. In this paper, we present a framework that assists designers to build a model of an expert's solving process semi-automatically. Based on this model, we propose an algorithm that analyzes player's traces in order to generate pedagogical labels about the learner's behavior. We carried out an experimental study which aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of the labeling algorithm. From a usability point of view, we also use the experiment to validate the acceptation and readability of pedagogical labels by the teachers.

This paper presents a prototype of a Serious Game that aims to entice gamers to learn computer programming by using a multiplayer real time strategy game (RTS). In this type of game, a player gives orders to his/her units to carry out operations (i.e. moving, building, and so forth). Typically, these instructions are given by clicking on a map with the mouse. The goal of this project is to encourage players to give these orders through programming. This game is intended for computer science students in higher education and can be used across both university and professional curricula. The programming languages used are C or C++.