Constructionism and Game-Based Learning as Didactic Strategies in Programming Education

• Constructionism is like constructivism built upon the idea of learning by actively creating knowledge structures “in a context where the learner is consciously engaged in constructing a public entity, whether it’s a sand castle on the beach or a theory of the universe” (Seymour Papert). Like students learning French by living in France, Papert had a vision that math students should live and construct their own knowledge in Mathland. This chapter describes and discuss the idea of university students learning to program by constructing computer games in Gameland.The overall research strategy has been a case study of seven instances of a summer course on multimedia programming and game construction. Like in constructionism the didactic idea has been student-centred and with the emphasis on discovery learning with teachers more taking the role as programming coaches and facilitators of students’ learning. Teachers’ aim has also been to visualise the process of learning to program, and to engage students in concrete way through construction and deconstruction of digital games. This course was designed and implemented at a department of computer science in 2009. In the summer of 2016 the course is given for the seventh time and the study is based on seven versions of the course with course batches from 60 up to 400 participants.Data has been collected from course documents, course evaluation questionnaires and postings in discussion fora in the virtual learning platform Moodle. Furthermore, there have been analyses of students’ submitted solutions of a mini-project where digital games have been designed and implemented in the Python programming language with the use of the add-on library PyGame.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap -- Didaktik (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences -- Didactics (hsv//eng)

Keyword

constructionism

game-based learning

didactics

instructional design

programming education

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

kap (subject category)