Serious Games as Innovative Formative Assessment Tools for Programming in Higher Education

This paper examines four serious games for programming education developed by final-year Computer Games Development students at the University of the West of Scotland as part of a Serious Games honours module. The central thesis is that students, who have recently completed the courses they are now designing for, are well placed to create gamified formative assessments for lower-level peers, and that this participatory approach enhances both engagement and creativity. The authors frame programming as a demanding skill linked to high attrition on Computer Science courses, and argue that hybrid post-pandemic delivery calls for new teaching approaches beyond traditional lectures, tutorials, and labs.

The paper analyses the four games (OOPs, Planet Edolia, Coder-Bot, and LearnToCode) using a compiled categorisation framework that draws on learning outcomes, science education taxonomies, the Learning Mechanics-Game Mechanics model, general serious game classifications, narrative design, and programming-specific educational content. Each game was implemented in Unity, targets mental activity through visual and auditory modalities, and relies primarily on keyboard and mouse interaction. The games covered object-oriented programming concepts, C# syntax, basic programming constructs such as sequence, selection, and iteration, and fundamental concepts including variables, methods, and control statements. The authors note that the games were categorised mainly as professional simulation or embodied system games, and that most used distributed narrative and endogenous fantasy.

The authors' conclusions are largely qualitative. They observe considerable variety in how students approached the task, and they identify that only one game incorporated most of the learning mechanics associated with retention, which they consider an important gap given university concerns about student retention. They acknowledge key limitations: the analysis covers only four games, no empirical evaluation with learners has yet been conducted, and the proposed framework remains preliminary. The paper recommends learner evaluation, replication at other institutions, and the development of a shared repository and formal design guidelines, while noting that the approach depends on students who possess both technical capability and sufficient subject-matter expertise.