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This work was supported in part by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities under Project TIN 2015-66731-C2-1-R, in part by the Madrid Regional Government through the project e-Madrid-CM under Project P2018/TCS-4307, and in part by the e-Madrid-CM Project through the European Structural Funds (FSE and FEDER).

Analysis of institutional authors

Hijon-Neira, RAuthorPerez-Marin, DAuthorMontes, SCorresponding Author

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Article

Using an Online Serious Game to Teach Basic Programming Concepts and Facilitate Gameful Experiences for High School Students

Publicated to:Ieee Access. 9 12567-12578 - 2021-01-01 9(), DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3049690

Authors: Montes, Hernan; Hijon-Neira, Raquel; Perez-Marin, Diana; Montes, Sergio

Affiliations

Univ Fuerzas Armadas ESPE, Comp Sci Dept, Sangolqui 171103, Ecuador - Author
Univ Rey Juan Carlos, Comp Sci Dept, Madrid 28933, Spain - Author
Univ Rey Juan Carlos, Dept Comp Sci, Madrid 28933, Spain - Author

Abstract

Teaching programming to pre-university students has attracted a great deal of attention in the last years. The benefits of teaching programming before University have been investigated by taking several approaches to improve the students' learning scores, motivation and satisfaction levels. Serious Games (SGs) are also gaining an increasing research interest for education. SGs can be defined as games designed for a primary goal other for than pure entertainment. In the case of this paper, the DFD-C serious game has been created to investigate whether High School students will improve their learning of programming fundamentals and, if there are gender differences in the improvement. Moreover, it is explored the perception of the gameful experience by the students when using a serious game such as DFD-C, and if this perception is different in the case of boys or girls. An experiment with 38 K-10 High School students has been carried out during the 2019-2020 academic year. All students took a pre-test at the beginning of the experiment. After that, they were randomly split into a control group (no use of DFD-C) and a test group (use of DFD-C). Finally, all of them took the same test (post-test) to measure their learning gains. The test group also completed the Gamefulquest questionnaire to evaluate their perception of the gameful experience. A significant improvement in the scores of the test students was registered, with no gender differences. Moreover, the answers to the Gamefulquest reveal that students had a positive gameful experience, being the ratings of the girls slightly higher than boys. It is concluded that using SGs to teach learning programming fundamentals to High School students increased their learning scores and students perceived the sense of playfulness, guidance and social experience of the SG without having significant differences between girls and boys.

Keywords

C languageData flow diagramsEducationGameful experienceGamesGender differencesHigh school studentsKernelLearning programmingLearning-of-programmingProgrammingProgramming basicsProgramming knowledgeProgramming professionResearch interestsSerious gamesStudentsTeaching programmingTestingToolsUniversity students

Quality index

Bibliometric impact. Analysis of the contribution and dissemination channel

The work has been published in the journal Ieee Access due to its progression and the good impact it has achieved in recent years, according to the agency Scopus (SJR), it has become a reference in its field. In the year of publication of the work, 2021, it was in position , thus managing to position itself as a Q1 (Primer Cuartil), in the category Engineering (Miscellaneous).

From a relative perspective, and based on the normalized impact indicator calculated from World Citations from Scopus Elsevier, it yields a value for the Field-Weighted Citation Impact from the Scopus agency: 1.16, which indicates that, compared to works in the same discipline and in the same year of publication, it ranks as a work cited above average. (source consulted: ESI Nov 14, 2024)

Specifically, and according to different indexing agencies, this work has accumulated citations as of 2025-06-24, the following number of citations:

  • WoS: 9
  • Scopus: 17
  • OpenCitations: 12

Impact and social visibility

From the perspective of influence or social adoption, and based on metrics associated with mentions and interactions provided by agencies specializing in calculating the so-called "Alternative or Social Metrics," we can highlight as of 2025-06-24:

  • The use, from an academic perspective evidenced by the Altmetric agency indicator referring to aggregations made by the personal bibliographic manager Mendeley, gives us a total of: 154.
  • The use of this contribution in bookmarks, code forks, additions to favorite lists for recurrent reading, as well as general views, indicates that someone is using the publication as a basis for their current work. This may be a notable indicator of future more formal and academic citations. This claim is supported by the result of the "Capture" indicator, which yields a total of: 154 (PlumX).

With a more dissemination-oriented intent and targeting more general audiences, we can observe other more global scores such as:

  • The Total Score from Altmetric: 2.35.
  • The number of mentions on the social network X (formerly Twitter): 3 (Altmetric).

It is essential to present evidence supporting full alignment with institutional principles and guidelines on Open Science and the Conservation and Dissemination of Intellectual Heritage. A clear example of this is:

  • The work has been submitted to a journal whose editorial policy allows open Open Access publication.

Leadership analysis of institutional authors

This work has been carried out with international collaboration, specifically with researchers from: Ecuador.

There is a significant leadership presence as some of the institution’s authors appear as the first or last signer, detailed as follows: First Author () and Last Author (Montes León, Sergio Raúl).

the authors responsible for correspondence tasks have been and Montes León, Sergio Raúl.