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Combining Digital Games with Culture: A Novel Approach towards Boosting Student Interest and Skill Development in Computer Science Programming

Proper development of Computer Science analytical programming skills requires rigorous practice sessions with problem sets and coding exercises, but this is often not apriority for many students. Digital educational games have been shown to increase the appeal of repetitive instructional tasks however many of these games fail to capitalize on the power of cultural motivators. In this paper, we investigate a novel approach towards game design, a culturally-enriched approach that deliberately plays up the strengths of culture as a motivational trigger and instructional stimulant. The research presented illustrates how powerful motivational hooks were created in an educational gaming environment for developing analytical programming skills through subtle, careful use of cultural elements. An experiment conducted using the game revealed modest gains in the debugging skills of 77% of the student participants, and a strong relationship between length of game play and increase in analytical skill. Furthermore, a strong relationship was found linking the degree of cultural game feedback to positive student affect towards programming exercises thereby validating the utility of our approach.