Students of Information Technology (IT)-related undergraduate courses often face barriers like insufficient prerequisites for difficult subjects and lack of motivation. The completion of abstract tasks like logical thinking, algorithm design and programming often gets harder than usual, since frequently they require basic knowledge of some foreign language, explicitly English. In the context of non-native English-speaking countries, the IT students can face a specific problem of having to write programming codes using keywords and commands mainly in English; In this sense, the goal of this paper is to present the repurposing of an open-source conventional, entertainment-driven 2D game to an educational game to teach technical English, related to programming fundamentals. An alpha version of the educational game has been delivered and a subjective experiment was carried out with a sample of 42 IT students and the results of the paper show that the repurposing was done in a straightforward way.
The portuguese empire was the first world empire in history, covering almost six
centuries of existence, starting in 1415. It is noted that during most of them almost six
centuries, the Portuguese language had a great influence in the world [
Today, what they define as great powers are no longer wars over territories, ships and
exploratory trips by oceans, etc., but technology, within this great area, known
Information Technology is of great importance. As can be seen in [
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In addition to the examples of situations that the CP student needs technical English to deal with the discipline, there are other situations that even include the reserved words of the languages that also belong to the English language.
In countries that do not speak English officially, most students have poor English
experience and are unable to communicate or write fluently in English [
Because Latin American countries do not speak English as an official or mother
tongue, students lack the awareness that English allows free access to different people
and places and that it is the most studied language in the world [
In Mexico, [
In a similar ranking, among 88 countries, Brazil was ranked 53rd; in 2017 Brazil was
in 41st place, but instead of rising positions it fell to 53rd position, in that same
ranking Mexico was in 57th place, Argentina was in 27th place and Costa Rica in
36th place ; Chile ranked 46 [
At Costa Rica, material activities for language teaching have focused on music,
debates, stimulating images and fun stories, in an attempt to motivate students and
immerse themselves in the language [
Many studies and systems have used fun as an aspect to attract students' attention
and motivate them, as examples of Educational Games and Gamification of systems
[
The work [
A Digital Game is an interactive software that makes use of audiovisual resources (drawing, animation, music, script, etc.) for the purpose of entertainment. Open software (free and opensource) is software that the developer has made available the source code / project so that people (third parties) can change it and providing a license that allows this manipulation legally. Thus, an open digital game is a game available for internal manipulation at the source code level and with a license that allows changes without copyright infringement.
There are some opensource digital games on the market, but in numbers far less
expressive than commercial digital games. This is because the development of a
digital game is expensive and time consuming and companies want to obtain financial
return to cover the invested expenses and still generate profit (necessary to keep the
company running). So, for big digital gaming companies, the open source philosophy
is not interesting, at least not without another type of model that generates profit
elsewhere. The Purpose is the adaptation, modification and redistribution of the game
to a new context with the consequence of giving a new purpose to the software, which
in practice works as a conversion. In the case of this article, the purpose is used and
suggested to convert a digital entertainment game to an educational digital game. An
important observation is that the Re-Purpose requires that the 5 characteristics of the
Willey [
The open digital game has already been explained, but to understand the purpose of
a digital game, we need to understand the culture of modification of digital games.
The culture of game modification is already established (it is a current reality) and the
trend is that it will continue to grow [
To modify a digital entertainment game to an educational digital game, we tested four games that have open source and free license to choose the game for modification. We focus on games that are coded in Python, Java or C # and with RPG or 2D Platform styles, as they are two very popular and classic styles. The first was Stolen Crow with Python code and MIT license (https://github.com/justinmeister/TheStolen-Crown-RPG), the second was Platformer Microgame with C # code and license from Unity Free Extension Asset (https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/templates/platformer-microgame-151055), the third was Simple Platformer (https://github.com/SteveSmith16384/SimplePlatformer) with license from MIT and the fourth JumPY Man ( https://github.com/haseebheaven/JumPYMan-Game) with Python code and GPL3 license. The game chosen was Unity Engine's Platformer Microgame.
Fig. 3 shows the page, on the internet, of the game Platfromer Microgame distributed free for modification by Unity Technologies, this page is completely written in English.
The educational content of the game consists of part of programming fundamentals and part of technical English to support programming. Programming content consists of: main data types and variables (int, float, bool, string), arithmetic operations (subtraction, sum, multiplication and division), operations and logical operators (And, Or, false, true, not), relational operations and operators (less, greater, equals) if / else statement, for / while statement. As can be seen in Table 1, the most modified artifacts were: Programming (C # Script), Scenario (as already shown in Fig. 5) and Educational Content (which was created from scratch and had the narrative as support). Art, Narrative and Level Design were changed less intensely, so that Art and Level Design had a supportive relationship to the modification of the Scenario (and vice versa) and the Narrative served as a justification and explanation of the content educational inserted (so that this content would not be aggressive, too much and would not harm fun and engagement). Mechanics, Music and Sounds were slightly changed. The mechanics were little changed, because the main idea was to make the most of it, because it is a Classic Mechanics and known for its fun and success in several commercial digital games. The music itself has not been altered, but sounds have been added to make the puzzles and their solutions clearer, and these sounds were related to the music to keep the sound aesthetics pleasing.
To evaluate the Read All C # game, an intervention was carried out with 42 higher
education students from the Computer Science course. As the objective was to
evaluate the students' experience under a qualitative approach, we analyzed two
different reference models for the evaluation process. The first was the generic ITU
BT500 assessment (https://www.itu.int/rec/R-REC-BT.500) - and the other was the
MEEGA + model [
Based on the intervention carried out with the questionnaire, we realized that students liked the idea of learning technical English focused on the fundamentals of programming using a digital 2D platform game. It was realized that a game like this can keep students motivated to learn, mainly by answering questions 7 and 9. The game can make students more interested in the topics of the programming discipline and give more value to the use of the English language for the programming context, since the player is faced with an English vocabulary and expressions to which he must understand to solve the game puzzles that involve programming, as could be seen by the means of questions 2, 11, 12 and 13. Question 6 resulted in an average of 4 and attests that students strongly recommend this game to other students of programming / technical English.
We realized that the attempt to modify an open-source game was positive and that the educational purpose was achieved; the extension of the 5R model of the open source criteria is possible to include the purpose. This game / MOD can be adapted to other contexts that include other disciplines and students' age groups. What was most changed in the project were the artifacts: programming, setting and educational content; the least altered artifacts were music / sounds and game mechanics, as shown in Table 1.