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Programming in game space: how to represent parallel programming concepts in an educational game

Concurrent and parallel programming (CPP) skills are increasingly important in today's world of parallel hardware. However, the conceptual leap from deterministic sequential programming to CPP is notoriously challenging to make. Our educational game Parallel is designed to support the learning of CPP core concepts through a game-based learning approach, focusing on the connection between gameplay and CPP. Through a 10-week user study (n 25) in an undergraduate concurrent programming course, the first empirical study for a CPP educational game, our results show that Parallel offers both CPP knowledge and student engagement. Furthermore, we provide a new framework to describe the design space for programming games in general.