A new game-based strategy for enhancing youth programming skills

Abstract

Teaching computer programming to secondary school students has continued to further attract the researchers' and practitioners' attention in recent years. These young learners do not have enough computer programming knowledge and skills while they continue to waste huge amount of time for playing video games. One way to cope both problems is redirecting students' energy from playing video games to learning video game programming. This qualitative study proposes a solution based on game-based instruction and learning by design approaches to address the aforementioned problems. The research method is Design-Based Research. Qualitative data was collected from the students in an Iranian secondary school and their parents. The main output of this study is in the form of instructional design principles for teaching programming to secondary school students. The problems caused by the students' excessive video game playing, the impact of applying the mentioned principles on spending time on video games, the students' learning quality, and their satisfaction are also taken into account.