Towards a new massive multiplayer online role playing game for introductory programming

Successful computer programming education is facing significant problems even nowadays for both students and teachers. To this end, the specificities of those difficulties and the corresponding causes continue to be an ongoing topic of research. According to relevant case studies, these relate to the complex concepts of computer programming as well as the lack of motivation by students to achieve the given goals. On the other hand, the emerging field of Games Based Learning is gradually delivering games that are applied in a series of educational contexts. In this paper, we aim to initially investigate the educational games developed for and used in the computer programming domain and review to which level they address the aforementioned difficulties. Related work includes a number of games that have been developed towards this goal. However, even though they seem promising examples, they lack features that would allow them to successfully underpin computer programming learning by facing the majority of the identified problems. To this end, we propose a new, advanced Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) that includes the facilitating and positive features identified in existing solutions and incorporates missing elements that will bring forth a new generation of educational games for introductory computer programming.