When Good Games Promote Good Programming

This study presents an overview and summary of the initial results of encouraging and evaluating novice programmers, in this case young girls, by tasking them to create their own video games in the Scratch environment. The structure included an open-ended, but authentic task allowing them to explore several challenging abstract programming concepts such as variable manipulation and conditionals. This paper describes the ways in which we are analyzing student’s programming processes in terms of the tasks they were given. The goal is develop analytics for the projects that describe the student’s grasp (or lack thereof) of computer science concepts.