Educating novices in the art of programming is a key challenge in computer science education. To develop their skills, novices rely on feedback to understand the effects of gradual code changes. However, programming environments lack suitable mechanisms for perceiving how changes affect running programs. As a result, forming mental models about cause-and-effect relationships is hard, and learning how to program can be tedious and frustrating. To make the learning experience more engaging and fun, we propose a combination of game-based learning and live programming. In particular, we study how to create visual programming environments and tutorials that: a) bring the code to life through game design and play; and b) introduce immediate feedback, with every minor code change, for exploring immediate effects. We develop Vie, an app for prototyping and play testing a game’s mechanisms simultaneously. Originally designed as a professional game design tool, we have also successfully applied Vie in a programming tutorial. At the CWI open day, kids aged 8 to 14 engaged in exploratory programming using two design themes: a) recovering a lost bunny; and b) preventing climate change. Our work is still ongoing. We report initial experiences, describe preliminary insights, and reflect on making further improvements.

Riemer van Rozen is a lecturer and researcher at the Software Analysis and Transformation group of Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI). Since 2011, he has collaborated with industry in several applied research projects on languages and tools that speed up development and improve software quality. His research focuses on generic solutions for domain-specific languages and live programming environments in general, and automated game design in particular. PhD Dissertation: R.A. van Rozen. “Languages of Games and Play: Automating Game Design & Enabling Live Programming”, University of Amsterdam, Feb 2020. link.