Engaging young learners in making games

Abstract

There has some initial work on using game play and game development to engage young children in STEM learning [5, 22, 23]. However, there not been a lot of recent work on using game development to engage young children in improving computational thinking. In this paper, the author provides an overview of an exploratory study of a group of forth grade and a group of fifth grade students during summer 2017. Both groups of students used a free game development platform from Microsoft (Kodu Game Lab) to make computer games. The results found that the participants in both camps demonstrated significant changes in attitudes and perceptions of CS.