Serious Game and Students’ Learning Motivation: Effect of Context Using Prog&Play

Abstract

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.

Addressing teachers' concerns about the Prog&Play serious game with context adaptation

“…In previous works (Muratet et al, 2012), a quantitative study showed that the students' interest for Prog&Play was not only related to the intrinsic game quality, it was also related to the teaching context (Figure 2). In this paper, we assume, that, from teachers' point of view, an objective criteria of Prog&Play successful use is whether teachers reuse Prog&Play after a first experimental use.…”

“…Earlier quantitative studies (Muratet et al, 2011(Muratet et al, , 2012 suggested that workshop or project contexts of Prog&Play teaching settings were more beneficial for learners' satisfaction than regular lectures along with practice sessions. Our research questions are as follows:…”

Building on the Case Teaching Method to Generate Learning Games Relevant to Numerous Educational Fields

“…LGs have been created for higher education these past years: the Laboratorium of Epidemiology [2] uses a LG to trainmedical students to find solutions to combat the propagation of nosocomial diseases in hospitals, Prog&Play [3] is a LG designed to teach programming skills and many other…”

Improving student engagement on programming using app development with Android devices

“…Concurrency is not a problem either, as multiple students can be connected and performing experiments at the same time. However, it becomes difficult to motivate students when they work with simulations instead of real devices. Another alternative is to design the practice sessions so that they result interesting to the students, using just the computers and not needing additional hardware; see, for example, . However, such alternative will not be covered in the present paper, where the focus will be set on virtual or real devices.…”