Programming Arcade Games using Natural Language - Utilizing inherent language skills as a gentler introduction to Computational Thinking

Abstract

Due to the technological advances in society, the need for digital competences is increasing. The purpose of this thesis is to develop a web application that introduces children between ages 10 and 18 to basic programming concepts and train them in Computational Thinking by using their existing knowledge of Natural Languages. By using a restricted part of Natural Language instead of a programming language, we take advantage of the users inherent language skills, with the aim of a gentler introduction to Computational Thinking. Questions that are treated include, among others, what contribution can be made to the education of children in Computational Thinking, how to handle the input from the user, how to transform the input to a playable game and how the system should handle errors in the input. These questions were investigated by the development of an application which consists of a parser, implemented using a third party parsing library (Nearly.js), an Evaluator, which evaluates the result from parsing the input and organises it in a data structure that represents the game. This data structure, the game representation, is then given to a game engine that constructs a playable game according to the users intentions. This game is then displayed in the User Interface, where the user can interact with it. Possible strategies for evaluating our system are A-B testing, survey or user analysis. Furthermore, extensions on the application include more extensive error messages, support for multiple source languages and providing challenges to test the user. We conclude that the result was a modular and extendable application. Moreover, it is our conviction that our application does contribute to learning parts of Computational thinking.