Creating and using digital games for learning in elementary and secondary education

The use of digital games in education has gained considerable popularity in the last years due to the fact that these games are considered to be excellent tools for teaching and learning and offer to students an engaging and interesting way of participating and learning. In this study, the design and implementation of educational activities that include game creation and use in elementary and secondary education is presented. The proposed educational activities’ content covers the parts of the curricula of all the Informatics courses, for each education level separately, that include the learning of programming principles. The educational activities were implemented and evaluated by teachers through a discussion session. The findings indicate that the teachers think that learning through creating and using games is more interesting and that they also like the idea of using various programming environments to create games in order to teach basic programming principles to students.