Reflection in Game-Based Learning: A Survey of Programming Games
This addresses the problem of insufficient reflection support in educational games for learners and educators, but it is incremental as it surveys existing work and identifies future directions.
The paper examines educational programming games to analyze how reflection is supported, finding that current approaches prioritize accuracy over individual learning and often only support reflection post-gameplay.
Reflection is a critical aspect of the learning process. However, educational games tend to focus on supporting learning concepts rather than supporting reflection. While reflection occurs in educational games, the educational game design and research community can benefit from more knowledge of how to facilitate player reflection through game design. In this paper, we examine educational programming games and analyze how reflection is currently supported. We find that current approaches prioritize accuracy over the individual learning process and often only support reflection post-gameplay. Our analysis identifies common reflective features, and we develop a set of open areas for future work. We discuss these promising directions towards engaging the community in developing more mechanics for reflection in educational games.