Designing Programming Exercises from Board Games

Abstract

This paper introduces a collection of board games specifically chosen to serve as a basis for programming exercises. We examine the attractiveness of board games in this context as well as features that make a particular game a good exercise. The collection is annotated across several dimensions to assist choosing a game suitable for the target topic and student level. We discuss possible changes into exercise tasks to make them more challenging and introduce new topics. The work relies on established topics taxonomy and board games resources which makes extending the current collection easy.