Engaging novice programmers through gamification : Puzzles to teach and motivate programming learning

Abstract: With an increasing number of primary schools having programming as a mandatory subject, students and teachers face new challenges by having to teach and learn a subject that is often difficult to engage students in. Many tools exist that introduce the problem solving aspect of programming, using a programming language not used in actual software. The programming languages used in these tools are often easier to understand and therefore engage the students more. In this study, an application teaching programming in Python is proposed while still engaging the students by including gamification elements. By having two groups of users, one group with gamification elements available in the software, and the other with them unavailable, the engagement could be compared between the two groups. With the data collected from Google Analytics, completion rate and surveys, it was shown that users with gamification elements available are slightly more engaged. Through the results gathered from this study, the use of gamification elements in this type of software can have an impact on user engagement and should therefore be considered when building similar types of systems.