What Students Think About Game-Themed CS1

Abstract

There has been rising academic interest in including computer game programming in CS1 curriculum during the past years, and many experience reports exist on the topic. Still, there is a need for knowledge on student reception, that is, how the students themselves view the game theme on a CS1 course. In this paper we review our CS1 course feedback from the years 2008–2013, of which three first years were carried out without games, while the latter three years part of our weekly assignments, plus a bigger course assignment, have been “game-themed”. We found that over 90 % found contextualization through games fun, motivating or rewarding in some other way. Less than 10%of the respondents have somewhat a negative overtone about the course theme. At the same time, dropout rate has declined more than 12 percentage points.