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Teaching Programming Principles

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Juliano Schimiguel

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 CLEI ELECTRONIC JOURNAL, VOLUME 13, NUMBER 2, PAPER 3, AUGUST 2010

Teaching Programming Principles through a Game Engine

Cristiane Camilo Hernandez, Luciano Silva, Rafael Alencar Segura,

Juliano Schimiguel, Manuel Fernández Paradela Ledón,
Luis Naito Mendes Bezerra, Ismar Frango Silveira

Universidade Cruzeiro do Sul, São Paulo, Brazil

{cristiane.camilo, luciano.silva, rafael.segura, juliano.schimiguel, manuel.ledon,
luis.naito, ismar.silveira}@cruzeirodosul.edu.br

Abstract
Teaching fundamental programming to freshmen is a hard task to be performed, given the high level
of abstraction and logical reasoning that are required for these students to develop in a very early stage
of their course. This paper presents a discussion about this topic, along with a case study where
computer games are meant to be developed by students in a first programming course, through the use
of a game engine which allow students to develop fundamental programming skills without having to
learn syntax and idiosyncrasies of any programming language.
Keywords: Teaching programming, Games, Game engine, Logic reasoning skills

1 Introduction

There is a large variety of factors that could be pointed out to justify the high rates of dropouts that are often
observed in CS (Computer Sciences) and IT (Information Technology) courses’ initial years. Some of these factors
are related to freshmen’s expectations about the course itself, which are far from CS courses’ reality that demand,
for instance, a solid Math background. However, another dropout cause could be related to those courses that are
meant to teach the basis of programming logic, which demand from students higher abstraction levels than they are
used to having, besides considerable skills for general problem solving. Tasks proposed by these courses normally
are planned to make students develop cognitive abilities that normally had not been developed before. Such
development often contrasts with the strictly curriculum-based macrostructure of K-12 and High School, often
applied in undergraduate courses.
Many authors agree with these affirmations, stating that the process of learning programming is a slow and
gradual task to be performed [6], besides the fact that today’s programming languages - because of their complexity
- do not seem to be adequate tools to teach programming foundations [14]. Many programming languages, such as
Pascal – which was developed having as a main goal the teaching of programming, thus being simple structured,
have evolved to languages that are intrinsically tied to more complex environments – such as Delphi. More than this,
Jenkins [12] affirms that such languages usually have adequate syntax constructions for professional programmers,
but not for initial learners. Pereira Jr. & Rapkiewickz [17] [18] present the difficulties students usually encounter on
the assimilation of the abstract process of elaborating an algorithm, which frequently leads to many students’
failures and dropouts, sometimes in a very early stage of an undergraduate course. The same authors point out that
programming-related courses are responsible for the highest failure rates in Brazilian Universities within IT and CS-
related courses, which demands a reflection and a paradigmatic change in didactical practice on these courses.
Gomes et al. [10] shows a more detailed discussion about this issue.
There is another key problem to be addressed, which is the global phenomenon of the oscillating rate of
enrollment in CS-related courses. This fact could be observed in following Figure 1 and 2.

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 CLEI ELECTRONIC JOURNAL, VOLUME 13, NUMBER 2, PAPER 69264, APRIL 2010

Figure 1. Oscillating enrollment in CS-related courses at UCLA, with two major peaks [25].

Fig. 1 shows an evolutionary graphic of enrollment in CS-related courses at UCLA (University of California at
Los Angeles), from 1971 to 2004, having two peaks clearly motivated by the advents of microcomputers (at the
beginning of 80’s) and spreading of Internet in the USA (end of 90’s). It is reported that around 2004, less than 2%
of UCLA’s freshmen applied to Computer Sciences as their majors.
On the other hand, Fig. 2, extracted from [5] shows that US schools recently had recorded a slight increase of
enrollment in their CS undergraduate courses, whose majors rose 8.1%, thus recording its first increase since 2000.
This positive oscillation, however, has not yet been reflected in Brazil: Fig. 3, based on data presented by Simon
[23], shows a notable reduction of applicant to vacancy ratio in Brazilian’s FUVEST (Fundação Universitária
para o Vestibular – University Foundation for Entrance Exam) entrance exam for Computer Sciences at IME-USP
(Instituto de Matemática e Estatística da Universidade de São Paulo – Math and Statistics Institute at São
Paulo University), registering from 2001 to 2008 a decrease of 45.9 points.

Figure 2. Newly Declared CS/CE Undergraduate Majors in US universities

Figure 3. Reduction on applicant to vacancy ratio for CS’ entrance exam at IME-USP (Brazil)
Regarding the whole scenario, Fig. 4, extracted from [15], shows freshmen enrollment in CS/IT-related courses in
Brazil. In spite of the global growth of enrollments, it must be noted that enrollment in CS and CE (Computer

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 CLEI ELECTRONIC JOURNAL, VOLUME 13, NUMBER 2, PAPER 3, AUGUST 2010

Engineering) courses oscillated slightly from 2001 and 2008; IS (Information Systems) undergraduate courses had a
perceptible growth from 2001 and 2004, tending to face a stabilization from 2005 to 2008.
SE: Software
Engineering
TDC: Teaching
Degree on
Computing
SC: Sequential
Courses
CE: Computer
Engineering
STC: Short-term
courses
IS: Information
Systems
CS: Computer
Science

Figure 4. Freshmen enrollment in CS and IT-related courses in Brazil, extracted from [15].
The other courses mentioned in Fig. 4 are TDC (Teaching Degree in Computers), SC (Sequential Courses), and
others. Still according to Fig. 4, growth in CS/IT area has being noted only in Short-Term Courses (STC), normally
four or five semesters long. The number of enrollments is proportional to the total number of students graduating
from this field, as seen in Fig. 5, recently increasing only in STCs.

Graduating students
Others

STC

TDC SC

IS

CE

CS

Year

Figure 5. Graduated students in CS and IT-related courses in Brazil, extracted from [15].
Fig. 6, based on [3], shows a graphic where it can be observed that, even though having more graduating students,
this number is not even near to the forecasted demand for jobs in this area.

CS

IP

EA

Total

Figure 6. Graduated students from 2006 to 2011 (forecast) – careers’ original names were kept from [3]: CS
(Computer Sciences), IP (Information Processing) and EA (Electronics and Automation).
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 CLEI ELECTRONIC JOURNAL, VOLUME 13, NUMBER 2, PAPER 69264, APRIL 2010

Besides the freshmen’s decreasing interest to enroll in CS-related courses, the number of students actually
enrolled is not enough to supply the abovementioned forecasted demand. Regarding Brazilian reality, according to
[3,2] such demand varies from 100,000 to 130,000 new professionals per year.
Considering this scenario of oscillating – often decreasing – students’ enrollment, high dropout rates and an
insufficient number of graduated students, there is an urgent need for reflection about strategies to attract and retain
students in CS-related undergraduate courses.
By using conventional didactic strategies for a first programming course, for instance, barely a “tangible product”
would be obtained at the end of this course – often, the result of these courses is a raw program written in C or Java,
very unrelated to the systems being used by students daily. There must be considered, in this context the new
st
students’ profile that universities have been facing in these first years of the 21 century: they are the first
generation of “digital natives”, using the term coined by Prensky [20]. According to this author, the simple fact that
these students have been educated in a highly digital context, immerse into technology since their childhood,
influences the formation of different cognitive processes. Tapscott [24] names such generation as n-gen, or “net
generation”, meaning those people that grew up using technological resources – mainly the Internet, in a largely
natural manner, which changed the way these people deal with situations and with other people, making huge use of
interaction aspects and collaborative work. Thus, the perception of these students’ new profile leads to a reflection
about new teaching strategies, more adequate to this new reality.
In this sense, there is a large variety of experiences using non-commercial environments and tools to teach
programming [19], or even different organizational approaches [4]. Many of these strategies have a common point
the effort to deliver to students quotidian situations, which could reflect students’ realities, according to the
principles of Meaningful Learning Theory [1]. In this way, this paper has as its main goal to present a game-based
methodological strategy to teach programming by using a game engine. This sort of tool allows teachers and
students to deal with programming logic fundamentals at a more concrete level, bringing students to an environment
which could seem more familiar to them. This strategy could have some positive effects in diminishing students’
dropout rates, at the same time that it is believed that such a strategy could help to motivate new students to enroll in
CS-related careers.

2 Teaching Programming in CS and IT Courses: Previous Works

The teaching of programming skills is a fundamental part of CS and IT curricula. [13]. Programming, as an
activity, permeates the other aspects of these courses and it is often a prerequisite for other disciplines.
Traditionally, the main goal of teaching computer programming is to promote the learning of a programming
language according to the following model: teacher has a computer lab available for practical classes. However,
according to Fontes & Silva [8], introductory programming courses usually follow pedagogical strategies since the
1990’s, which are based in books or handouts that have the initial concepts in some programming language, when
normally students learn how to make the classical program “Hello World” that shows the message “Hello World” on
the computer screen. Programming languages make use of keywords in English, which often are not part of the
students’ quotidian, unless they had a previous formation in a technical or extension course. Many of them even
confuse the “Hello World” message with the commands used to print the message itself – which denotes one of the
difficulties related to algorithm and programming teaching [22].
Recently, a case study was developed for data structure and programming logic teaching in high school, as a way
of motivating young students’ interests in CS and IT [9]. This study was performed by presenting logic problems to
students, who proposed algorithms in pseudo-language to solve them. After that, they implemented in C language.
Using student’s quotidian elements in teaching and learning processes is important [11], according to Ausubel
principles. In fact, the use of games as motivating elements in programming teaching has been proved to be an
effective strategy, as is shown in [7],[21] and [16]. In this way, the next item presents the case study that was
developed during the year 2009 in Cruzeiro do Sul University, located in São Paulo, Brazil.

3 Case study: a strategy for teaching basic programming concepts

The environment presented in this article involves the use of a game engine in the discipline of Computer
Programming, which is a common introductory course for freshmen in the CSTs (Colleges of Technology) in
Systems Analysis and Development, Internet Systems, Computer Networks, Game Development and Bachelor of
Computer Science. The plan of teaching the subject in question provides as general objective to discuss and present
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 CLEI ELECTRONIC JOURNAL, VOLUME 13, NUMBER 2, PAPER 3, AUGUST 2010

to students the concepts of: (i) fundamentals of computer logic and thinking, (ii) programming stages, (iii) language
classification, (iv) programming paradigms and (v) visual programming. Initially, the proposal was not focused on
any particular language, but the aim was to present programming techniques applied in various languages belonging
to different paradigms such as Java, C, JavaScript, Prolog, Logo and Scheme. Then, several programming principles
were put into practice by using the GameMaker engine. The GameMaker was chosen because it is a visual
programming tool that allows us to create applications in a simple and efficient manner. Moreover, it is an engine
geared to two-dimensional games that have elements of simpler interaction, appropriate to the profile of the students
in question: this is the main reason that three-dimensional engines were not considered for this experiment. When
working with Gamemaker, the student comes into contact with concepts and elements of programming, without
having to code them into a programming language itself, simply by using interface elements.
The course was developed having an eminently practical approach, with all classes taught in laboratories. In
introductory classes, GameMaker company's Web site developer (YoYo Games: http://www.yoyogames.com) was
presented, where students could download the free lite version. The environment, basic concepts, the toolbar and
some examples of games were presented, as shown in Fig 7, so that students are aware of the possibilities provided
by the engine while being motivated through practical examples.

Figure 7: A basic game: Scrolling Shooter [16].

During the course, we presented new elements of the tool, using the game design document, which contains
essential items for the process of level design as: objects, sounds, flow and level. From the knowledge of these
elements, the student is able to build logical structures to control games without necessarily manipulating a
programming language, or even having prior contact with the fundamentals of programming logic presented in the
traditional manner. We used the strategy of gradual transition between the visual, always linked to games, and
textual programming. The concepts treated in a first programming course included: setting and accessing variables,
decision command and repetition.
The treatment of variables began with the use of predefined variables for the GameMaker environment: score,
health and lives. These three variables define, respectively, the total points a player, a measure of living/damage and
quantity of life. In order to introduce the concept of variable, we used the game The Scrolling Shooter [16], where
experiments initially performed visual changes of these variables. As students gained experience in visually
changing these variables, visual commands were gradually replaced by scripting commands, as shown in Figure 8:

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 CLEI ELECTRONIC JOURNAL, VOLUME 13, NUMBER 2, PAPER 69264, APRIL 2010

Figure 8: Transformation of visual programming (change of a variable) into textual programming.

Then, we introduced the concept of declaration of variables. The environment GameMaker allows programmers
to declare variables in the environment both visually and in text format. Typically, the use of the visual environment
provides some initial facilities, in the sense that it is not necessary to specify the type in the declaration. In the
textual environment, we can use the notion of type, syntax that resembles the C Language. Figure 9 illustrates an
example of variable declaration in the visual and textual environments:

Figure 9: Declaration in both visual and textual environments.

Continuing the basic commands, we dealt with the conditional statement. This important concept of imperative
programming can be tested with so much fun in a gaming environment: collisions between objects, winner of a
game and the existence of a new phase are some examples presented in a systematic way to students. Normally, in
other programming languages, these examples cannot easily be constructed because they depend on knowledge of
graphics programming. Figure 10 shows an example of construction of the conditional statement, where you can
notice the presence of blocks:

Figure 10: Example of a conditional statement.

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 CLEI ELECTRONIC JOURNAL, VOLUME 13, NUMBER 2, PAPER 3, AUGUST 2010

Finally, the loop statement was covered. The GameMaker environment allows visual construction of repetitions
in the style of the iteration statement, where is not necessary to define a counter, but only the number of times a
particular block should be performed. In the final topic, it was adopted the same strategy above: gradual change of
the visual environment to text.
Compared to previous semesters, the use of the strategy of gradual change of the visual programming
environment to the text allowed students to develop very early, complex programming logic within a game without
relying on the constant challenges imposed by textual programming languages. The view offered by the gaming
environment has also allowed them to acquire skills to find logic errors based solely on visual inspection of game
operation.

4 Final considerations

This experience allowed the initial presentation of the concepts of visual programming, event-oriented
programming and object-oriented programming, without formalizations or specifications. Students start to build
these concepts themselves – or at least they begin the knowledge construction about these subjects - through teacher-
oriented controlled experimentation, they practiced in a simple development environment and in collaboration with
their classmates. It is possible to conclude that the use of a simple, interactive and intuitive development tool like the
GameMaker engine allows teachers to introduce to freshmen the basic principles of programming logic, without
dealing with paradigms’ idiosyncrasies or in programming languages’ details of syntax.

The informal presentation of some essential concepts for future programming activities to freshmen – event-based
programming, human-computer interaction and even object-oriented programming is particularly interesting. The
proposal of using ludic elements in games created, designed and developed by students themselves, based on the
exhibition of the previously mentioned theoretical elements, opens interesting possibilities regarding creativity, the
practice of logical reasoning and the commitment of appropriate use of a language. Thus, based on this analysis,
students’ performance improvement in a posterior course on programming can be verified in the class of 2009,
compared to 2008, when students did not have this course before having contact with real-world programming
(Figure 11).

Figure 11: Performance graphic of the students in the years 2008 and 2009.

In the first semester of 2008, teachers used traditional methods- in other words, first programming concepts were
presented to students through a programming language, namely Java. In the first semester of 2009 they started to use
GameMaker to present these concepts in a different way. It is noticeable that in both aspects evaluated (percentage
of delivered exercises and percentage of students who passed them) the performance of students was better in the
class of 2009 than 2008. It can be inferred that this performance improvement could have been influenced by such
methodological change. Nonetheless, a more detailed analysis is necessary to corroborate this hypothesis in future
works.

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 CLEI ELECTRONIC JOURNAL, VOLUME 13, NUMBER 2, PAPER 69264, APRIL 2010

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