Experimental Videogame Teaches Kids How to Program Java

• By Klint Finley
• 04.11.13
• 6:30 AM

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CodeSpells, the videogame where you cast magic spells in Java code.

Many videogames let you cast your very own magic spells. Usually, this involves pressing the right button on your mouse. But in an experimental game called CodeSpells, performing acts of magic requires a bit more brain power. All spells must be written in Java code.
Designed by academics at University of California, San Diego, CodeSpells is a way for young students to learn the art of programming. It was part of a research project detailed in a recent paper entitled “On the Nature of Fires and How to Spark Them When You’re Not There,” and on Tuesday, a test version was released to the world at large.
The game is the latest addition to an ever-growing list of tools designed to teach the art of programming to younger audiences — a list that includes everything from new programming languages to children’s books. Yes, children’s books. A Facebook engineer named Carlos Bueno recently published a book called Lauren Ipsum, which aims to teach the basics of programming to children as young as 5 years old — without forcing them to learn actual code.
Yes, kids can learn programming in more traditional ways, but finding qualified teachers is hard. Organizations like Code.org and the Computer Science Teachers Association are trying to solve this problem, and the Mozilla Foundation has gotten into the game with extra-curricular programs such as Summer Code Party, which pair kids with volunteer coders. But the UC San Diego researchers aimed to work around this problem.
They started by researching how today’s computer science professionals first found their passion for programming. After collecting and analyzing thirty of these “origin stories,” they discovered a few basic trends. Typically, they say, children catch the computing bug when during activities that emphasize play, creativity, and exploration. These activities were usually structured by the children themselves, and once they got going, they had trouble stopping. They found these activities empowering, and they would spend “countless hours” immersed in what they were doing.
In other words, it was a lot like playing a videogame.
With these trends in mind, the researchers built CodeSpells, a game where you wake up in a place populated by strange gnome-like creatures. The aim is to help these gnomes accomplish simple tasks through magic — i.e. Java code.
The researchers then tested then the game on a group of forty girls between the ages of 10 and 12, hoping to teach them programming concepts such as “for-if” statements, loops, and parameters.
The experiment was a success, at least according to the researchers. The girls didn’t just figure out how to use code to manipulate the game environment. They also found creative solutions to problems. For example, one student accidentally “levitated” an object too high for her character to react, so she had the character jump on another object and then levitate that second object high enough to reach the first one.
More importantly, the students enjoyed the game — and wanted to keep playing. “Students expressed disappointment that it was ‘over so soon,’” the paper reads. “25 of the subjects showed interest in playing CodeSpells at home and wanted to know when it would be available for them to play.”
Well, now that the beta version of CodeSpells is out, they’re in luck. Unless they use Windows. The beta only runs on Apple Macs.