Teaching Programming with Gamified Semantics
Ian Arawjo, Cheng-Yao Wang, Andrew C. Myers, Erik Andersen, and François Guimbretière

Dominant approaches to programming education emphasize program construction over language comprehension. We present Reduct, an educational game embodying a new, comprehension-first approach to teaching novices core programming concepts which include functions, Booleans, equality, conditionals, and mapping functions over sets. In this novel teaching strategy, the player executes code using reduction-based operational semantics. During gameplay, code representations fade from concrete, block-based graphics to the actual syntax of JavaScript ES2015. We describe our design rationale in depth and report on the results of a study evaluating the efficacy of our approach on young adults (18+) without prior coding experience. In a short timeframe, novices demonstrated promising learning of core concepts expressed in actual JavaScript code. We discuss ramifications for the design of future computational thinking games.

[ Full paper (PDF) | Reduct game ]