Online Game-Based Learning through Minecraft: Education Edition Programming Contest

Minecraft: Education Edition is an open-world game that promotes learning of basic concepts of programming in an immersive digital environment. While playing the game, pupils use coding to address various challenges in the world of Minecraft. To involve lower-secondary school pupils to programming in an entertaining way while they are learning from home for months during the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, we organized an online Minecraft: Education Edition Programming Contest as an activity of EU Code Week grassroots initiative in Slovakia. Ten programming tasks cover standards of Slovak Informatics curriculum for grade 5-6 in the field of programming and problem solving through algorithms. The tasks are analysed in terms of difficulty and categorized according to the subtopics in the curriculum, such as problem analysis, sequence of commands, loops, debugging and error correction. Results of the participating pupils' solutions are analysed in terms of success by age and gender.

Automated summary

Minecraft: Education Edition is a game that teaches basic programming concepts in an immersive digital environment, and an online programming contest was organized in Slovakia during the COVID-19 pandemic to engage lower-secondary school students in programming education while they are learning from home. The contest tasks covered standards of the Slovak Informatics curriculum for grade 5-6 and were analyzed based on difficulty and categorized by subtopics, with results of participating students' solutions analyzed in terms of success by age and gender.