FAST DELIVERY: An Educational Video Game for Developing Computational Thinking Skills

Fast Delivery is an educational game designed to facilitate the learning of computational thinking and development of logic, teaching the basic pillars that would be sentences, conditionals and cycles through an entertaining and innovative tool. Fast Delivery facilitates the resolution of programs because it is written in a textual programming language through a simple and intuitive pseudocode in the Spanish language. The game employs a gamified approach where users answer coding questions displayed on the screen by selecting code fragments from boxes to complete the given code. Using various associated techniques, such as gamification mechanics that will be lives and scores. And also the behavioral instruction technique that will work through visual and auditory stimuli. To evaluate the effects of the game use on learning and motivation, a study was carried out with students from a Chilean educational school. The results show that some students presented an overall learning gain, while others performed worse in the posttest than in the pretest. A motivational questionnaire based in the Self-determination Theory, supports the idea that students perceived the activity as difficult, lowering their sense of autonomy and competence, raising pressure, and thus negatively affecting motivation. Results by learning objective suggest that higher learnings were obtained for decision structures rather than for cycles and arithmetic operations with variables.