Using an Interactive Narrative App on Object Oriented Programming to Teach and Interest Students in Coding

Central to learning is attention, and students are more likely to engage with material if interested in it. Learning games are a popular method to encourage engagement. We designed a narrative learning game that targets middle school girls to teach and interest them in OOP. Because many students report difficulty with first time exposure to OOP, we thought it important to make learning more accessible. The narrative framework of our game serves not only to entertain, but to provide a rich medium via which our subjects can learn. Due to scheduling difficulties, we altered our demographic to the general student population. Nonetheless, we found that most subjects were entertained by Narrate, that many had an increased interest in computer science, and that Narrate was effective in teaching various OOP concepts. This validates the use of narrative games to teach OOP.