Games+Learning+Society 12 Conference

In today’s society programming has become a necessary skill— some may argue as important as reading or math. Yet, children are not typically introduced to the topic of computer science until high school or even college. Further, schools that do aim to introduce programming to children at younger ages cannot always do so because of a lack of technological resources and funding. To address this issue we designed a board game that aims to teach middle school children how to read and write Java code without the use of a computer. The game goes beyond teaching basic programming and problem solving techniques and actually introduces real syntax and code to the players. After several play tests with the target audience we have found that children not only enjoy playing the game but also can actually write syntactically correct Java code when tested after play.