Educational Games for Teaching Computer Science

Abstract

Much work has done on teaching Computer Science by having students program games, but little has been done on teaching Computer Science by having the students learn from playing educational games. The current work in this field does not seem to be particularly cohesive, so there is no clear idea of what has already been done, and what works. The focus of this thesis is to provide a clearer picture of the range of games available for teaching Computer Science, and to provide guidelines for designing and evaluating them. The first and primary part of the thesis was to find and provide detailed information on as many of the existing educational games that teach Computer Science as possible. An extensive search was performed, and 41 games were found. From these it can be seen that while a few topics, mainly binary and introductory programming concepts, have sufficient coverage, most topics in Computer Science have barely been touched. Of the games for teaching Computer Science that were found, most were available online, at no cost, and only required a short time investment to play. The second part of the thesis focuses on growing the number of games that could be used for teaching Computer Science. This is achieved by providing guidelines on producing new work, and an example game is produced to test the guidelines.