Structural Analysis for Simple Games Source Codes Applied to Programming Learning

Teaching programming and algorithms is a big challenge, not only in universities but also in schools and training centers. Many proposals for stimulating this process were made in the last years. Previously to this work we had developed JPlay. The JPlay framework was proposed and developed for teaching programming with the development of simple 2D games. In this paper we propose a heuristic based on the structural analysis of the behaviors of a JPlay program and, based on this heuristic, we developed a tool that makes analyzes of JPlay programs, guiding and teaching a student for a specific game development. The heuristic consists on a comparison approach between the student program and the model program and it has four levels of analysis: the sequential code pattern of the JPlay, standardization model, the comparison of similar classes and construction of behavior trees of similar variables. Thus, the comparison consists on searching behaviors of correspondence between pairs of classes among these programs. In this paper we also present a review of results of BrickBreak game based on the source code of the integrated high school students in the course of Computers.