Serious games for motivating into programming

In Computer Science Education there is a tendency to implement active learning paradigms where students are the focus of the educational process. An instantiation of these learning methods are gaming environments. We present ProGames, a system for learning programming skills through a leveled set of visually-attractive and interactive programming games in Greenfoot, categorized by student´s likes, offering them solutions to sets of problems that they really enjoy or like most. We present a combined evaluation of usability (first) done during the academic course 2012-13 in three Computer Science Degrees and an evaluation of appealing for the students (second) based on the organization in games categories done during the academic course 2013-14. The combination of both evaluations suggests that offering students a set of serious games that meets their likes really increases their appeal for the games and therefore for learning with them. We present this experience to encourage academia to propose their students learning materials which really are appealing to them and why not? Fun.