A Proposal for an Educational Game Platform for Teaching Programming to Primary School Students

Programming is considered by many a core skill of the 21st century. Learning the fundamentals of coding or programming encourages children to acquire new skills, such as problem solving, logical thinking, critical thinking, and Computational Thinking (CT), and moreover to be active creators of tomorrow. There are various platforms for learning coding and programming, and in particular game-based ones, which, through the gamification process, focus on increasing learners’ motivation and engagement. Most existing games are nowadays distributed through web platforms or mobile applications. Most suffer from major drawbacks, which make them difficult to use in a classroom environment, and there lack of an administrative platform does not allow the educator to assign tasks to students when at home. This paper proposes the design of an educational platform for teaching programming to primary school children. It has been designed and is to be developed on the CMX framework. The educational platform includes a web-based game for in classroom teaching, a mobile application game for outside of the classroom, and an administrative module for the teacher to organize the educational process and monitor pupils’ performance. Through specific learning analytics the instructor will be able to draw conclusions on whether the students achieved the specific learning objectives, as well as understanding the educational impact that these types of games actually have on students.