Designing Programming Exercises from Board Games

TL;DR

This paper presents a curated collection of board games designed to create engaging programming exercises, analyzing their suitability and providing annotations to tailor exercises to different topics and student levels.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic approach to selecting and adapting board games for programming education, including annotations and guidelines for customization.

Findings

Board games can effectively serve as programming exercises.

Annotated collection helps in selecting suitable games for various topics.

Framework supports easy extension and adaptation of exercises.

Abstract

This paper introduces a collection of board games specifically chosen to serve as a basis for programming exercises. We examine the attractiveness of board games in this context as well as features that make a particular game a good exercise. The collection is annotated across several dimensions to assist choosing a game suitable for the target topic and student level. We discuss possible changes into exercise tasks to make them more challenging and introduce new topics. The work relies on established topics taxonomy and board games resources which makes extending the current collection easy.