An Investigation of a Game Generator Tool to Teach Recursion

Learning programming is difficult for  most students. Particularly, the recursion topic. Although games have been proposed as an alternative instructional media given their motivational impact, their mainstream adoption rate in teaching still remains low.  One reason given for this is that designing and  developing relevant educational games  is   difficult, expensive,  and time consuming. In this project, a game generator tool is proposed to support non-technical experts (teachers) to easily create serious programming games. We design a prototype game generator tool using the user centered design method and conduct user evaluations with CS1 teachers and students. Results suggest that the proposed tool is effective in supporting CS1 teachers and the generated games have the potential to help students better learn the recursion topic.