Mobile serious games: Effects on students’ understanding of programming concepts and attitudes towards information technology

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to measure the impacts of mobile serious games on fifth grade students’ attitudes towards their course and achievements in programming concepts. For this purpose, a five weeks long study was conducted in a primary school in Turkey with 36 fifth grade students. Twenty-one students which are in the experiment group played the mobile serious game Lightbot which teaches some basic programming concepts on iPad for three weeks in one hour of the information technology and software course. On the other hand, the control group, which consisted of 15 students, had their lectures in information technology and software course according to the curriculum which is determined by the Ministry of Education of Turkey. In order to collect the data from the participants pretest-posttest design was used and the results were analyzed to test the hypotheses of the study. Data analysis results showed a significant increase in the achievements of the students in programming concepts after playing the Lightbot game while control group’s test results showed no increase. However, the treatment with the game did not create any positive impact on the attitudes of the students towards the information technology and software course as expected and further research in this field is necessary to verify this result.