Using games to teach programming

Abstract

The paper deals with the usage of games to attract and practice the knowledge of participants of a course in which the basics of MATLAB programming are taught. There were created several games for that purpose, the paper presents two of them. These games were used for educational purposes in last years and they were positively evaluated by the course participants. The students are more motivated, they carefully watch the source code and remember it easily, which helps them in future, in the future programming. The computer games summarize several parts of the basic course programming, such as conditions, cycles, working with files etc.