From playing to learning - Gamification

Image from Wikimedia Commons.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gamification-in-business-illustration-web.jpg

At the beginning of the year I wrote: "It is in this fertile soil where the first seed must be planted. I choose to plant the seed of challenge and curiosity, the seed of teamwork, the seed of #documenting4learning." Those were times of excitement and illusion.

The initial question remains: Do students learn through the use of games? Is computer programming a complex subject, which can be understood or taught with games?

Lets listen to an informal conversation (available only in Spanish) between a some students. They are talking about the firsts explorations. The talk revolves around the first explorations about the rules of the game and their challenges, to the first attempts to understand the basic rules of algorithm construction. There are attempts to guess some correct answers, but after a while and some basic readings about algorithms, the first correct results were not long in coming.

The weeks went by, the riddles in the computer programming games were increasingly complex and it was necessary to research in those topics a bit. Then, it was time to formalize some concepts and present results.

Some ideas about the video above:

1. At the beginning of the video the student defines some formal concepts, for each one of them illustrated with examples of the game used. Remember that the students did not have previous knowledge or were informal knowledge about what it means to program computers.
2. For each of the concepts, the student offers explanations in common terms to the end user, making it more understandable.
3. The screenshots are digitally intervened with the aim of annotating their contents. This indicates that the student can locate exactly the portion of the code on which the concept applies and explains it.
4. The student applies multiple intelligences in the description of the concepts. The use of songs is particularly interesting, since the concept of conditional expressions is usually a difficult concept to master by beginning programmers. The student is able to understand the concept and select a multimedia resource whose content is appropriate and correct.

Here the links to the coding games that were mentioned: 

• The silent teacher.
• Compute IT !

The Silent Teacher and the Compute IT ! games are original creations from: http://www.toxicode.fr/ They are great folks !