Serious games in tertiary education: A case study concerning the comprehension of basic concepts in computer language implementation courses

This paper describes Evaluators, a system for the development of educational serious games oriented to introductory computer language implementation courses similar to those included in Computer Science tertiary curricula. Evaluators lets instructors generate games from collections of exercises addressing basic concepts about the design and implementation of computer languages (in particular, the processing of artificial languages according to the model of attribute grammars). By playing the generated games, students interactively learn the fundamentals of the semantic evaluation process behind attribute grammars. Indeed, they implicitly find solutions to the exercises presented, and they receive immediate feedback about successful and incorrect actions. In addition, the games log students' actions, which can subsequently be analyzed by the instructors using a specialized analytic tool that is included in Evaluators. Assessment of the system, which was performed according to three different dimensions (the instructors' perspective, the students' perspective and educational effectiveness perspective), (a) indicates that the exercise-driven approach of Evaluators is a cost-effective approach amenable to extrapolation to other areas of Computer Science tertiary education, (b) shows a positive attitude of students toward the serious games built with Evaluators, and (c) evidences a positive effect of the system and its pedagogical strategy on long-term student performance.