Pixel International Conferences

Serious games are specially designed computer games in which education is the primary goal, rather than entertainment. They are interactive competitive lessons with defined learning outcomes and their importance in contemporary educational practice is increasing. The implementation of serious games in teaching has a potential to facilitate the learning process in terms of increasing students’ interest in learning to ensure better understanding of learning materials and application of acquired knowledge. Serious games can be used to stimulate programming learning. Besides learning coding skills, programming supports the development  of computational thinking, which is widely applicable and useful, not just in computer science, but also in everyday life. Programming is recognized as a crucial skill, even a new literacy, for all children and there is the emerging need to introduce programming concepts into primary schools from the first to the fourth grade. Computational thinking represents an increasingly important focus in informatics (computer science), and ways of incorporating it into the school curricula are being explored. Serious games offer an exciting opportunity for learners to engage in computational thinking. This paper presents an overview of the game genres suitable for better understanding of certain programming concepts. Games and tasks that were taken into consideration trigger the development of computational thinking skills by incorporating components such as abstraction, decomposition, evaluation, and generalization. The examples of serious games are given and classified according to the main programming concepts. This classification can be a starting point for selecting and designing adequate serious games to support the effective learning of programming concepts in the classroom. 

Keywords: serious games, computational thinking, primary education, game-based learning;