Abstract
One of the main barriers for educational games to properly fulfill the specific pedagogical, cultural and technical requirements that are often unique to each situation is the difficulty of reusing and adapting them to different educational contexts. In this sense, open educational games could facilitate reuse and adaptation, once they follow the openness principles. This paper provides a systematic review of open educational games designed specifically for teaching computer programming and computational logic. It has been identified that most authors find the issue of reusing and adapting educational games following the openness philosophy as very important, but even them fail to use open tools in game development. We conclude that most articles recommend using component-based development, reuse and adaptation, but reuse still does not happen in a practical sense. Also, the amount of studies on educational games for teaching programming is low in the scientific literature, and most open educational games available on the Internet are not documented nor have some associated published paper. Thus, reuse and adaptation may even occur, but without scientific documentation and publication.
Highlights
In the last decades, we have seen that the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) could bring valuable tools to help teaching and learning processes, since them allow more interaction and collaboration than traditional communication tools, which could help students to learn in a more efficient way, besides potentially making teaching process easier, expanding some common limits and barriers [1, 2].ICT have been proven not being a magical recipe that effectively changed the educational process: new pedagogies and practices are required to explore the potential of ICT in schools
The differential of our work is we have analyzed papers about the following topics: if they recommend or implement reuse and adaptation; the trends of scientific research to use and/or generate Open Educational Games (OEG); the types/styles of the Digital Games (DG) that are more used to educational purposes; which programming language practitioners and researchers are using in game development; and if there have been reported positive results on usage of OEG
We limit our survey according to following 5 criteria: (1) it covers the timespan from 2014 to 2019 (5 years and a half); (2) it focuses on studies that dissert about OEGs or similar, being applied research or not; (3) it includes papers published in scientific journals and international conferences and symposia; regional conferences, symposia and workshops were discarded; (4) the papers must be available in full way, papers that had only the abstract available were discarded; and (5) the papers had to contain at least two pages; papers with only one page were removed of this review
Summary
We have seen that the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) could bring valuable tools to help teaching and learning processes, since them allow more interaction and collaboration than traditional communication tools, which could help students to learn in a more efficient way, besides potentially making teaching process easier, expanding some common limits and barriers [1, 2].ICT have been proven not being a magical recipe that effectively changed the educational process: new pedagogies and practices are required to explore the potential of ICT in schools. One of the common job requirements today is computer literacy or fluency, which includes more than basic skills on how to use computer-based technologies or mobile devices; programming definitely a skill that every student must acquire [5]. In this topic, important concepts of OEG foundations are presented. [28] has the definition of DG as a digital system of rules and objects and it can motivate and guide player decisions to specific goals and subgoals Another definition for DG is found in [29]: a form of entertainment and media that can provide learning possibilities, which is played in digital devices. Even though the definition of [27] limits the use of EGs to reinforce some already acquired skill, many authors agree with not so limiting definitions; games are usually presented as effective, engaging tools that could support active learning, experimental learning and problem-based learning [30][49]
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