Teaching Programming with Gamified Semantics.

Dominant approaches to programming education emphasize program construction over language comprehension. We present Reduct, an educational game embodying a new, comprehension-first approach to teaching novices core programming concepts which include functions, Booleans, equality, conditionals, and mapping functions over sets. In this novel teaching strategy, the player executes code using reduction-based operational semantics. During gameplay, code representations fade from concrete, block-based graphics to the actual syntax of JavaScript ES2015. We describe our design rationale and report on the results of a study evaluating the efficacy of our approach on young adults (18+) without prior coding experience. In a short timeframe, novices demonstrated promising learning of core concepts expressed in actual JavaScript. We also present results from an online deployment. Finally, we discuss ramifications for the design of future computational thinking games.