A NEW GAME-BASED APPROACH FOR THE CREATIVE LEARNING OF PROGRAMMING IN THE DIGITAL MEDIA AREA

Teaching in the scientific area of Digital Media has been evolving to meet the challenges facing our society, particularly to create technologies that effectively provide added value to the human being, both professionally and in the personal life. This article presents a new teaching methodology that combines "creative programming" and "creatively learning programming", intertwining the use of digital games as the metaphor for the programming constructs, and gamification to enhance engagement and regular work. This is backed up on the knowledge that the introductory learning of programming is a process that requires the acquisition of cognitive skills, which fit into what is defined as Computational Thinking, but also that the process of learning programming has a high level of complexity. This causes specific difficulties that have been observed over several years, mainly as the practice requires specific mathematical skills, not so common in Digital Media students. The teaching methodology is based on a constructionist approach, with PBL, defining learning paths supported on digital games development. The difficulty inherent in constructing a problematic base, coherent with the learning process, led to the development of the Creative Programming Matrix, based on the triadic certification method. This matrix enables the teacher to select, organize and develop the best game examples to support the learning process. This work has been preliminarily evaluated through questionnaires to students and surveys to faculty that teaches programming courses. This method was instantiated in the restructuring of a course on a Master program in Multimedia. A set of gamified activities promoted a natural progression in the learning, essential for a first approach to the programming. From a set of clear objectives, the target behaviours and the profile of the students were defined, the cycles of involvement and the necessary tools were developed, not forgetting that learning should be fun! The results validate a higher efficacy and engagement of the students.