Leveraging Metaphors in a VR Serious Game for Computational Thinking

TL;DR

The paper tackles the difficulty of teaching computational thinking to young learners by introducing Cooking Code, a VR serious game that uses a kitchen metaphor and pseudocode blocks to teach programming concepts. It advances a novel design that leverages VR affordances, embodiment, and a progressive challenge sequence (sequential, conditional, iterative) to engage learners. The work synthesizes prior VR education research and provides design details and a plan for evaluation, with future directions including multisensory feedback, AI-generated challenges, and personalization. The approach has potential to improve engagement and understanding of programming fundamentals in middle school contexts.

Abstract

This paper presents Cooking Code, a VR-based serious game designed to introduce programming concepts to students (ages 12-16) through an immersive, scenario-driven experience. Set in a futuristic world where humans and machines coexist, players take on the role of a fast-food chef who must assemble food orders based on pseudocode instructions. By interpreting and executing these instructions correctly, players develop problem-solving skills, computational thinking, and a foundational understanding of programming logic. The game leverages the kitchen metaphor to teach computational thinking, using affordances for an immersive VR experience.

Figures (6)

• Figure 1: Food order: a hamburger with conditional logic. Spanish-English translation: PONER-PUT, pan inferior-bottom bread, queso-cheese, carne-meat, pan superior-top bread
• Figure 2: TV where feedback is shown, adorned with a cooker's hat and a tie
• Figure 3: Food order of a double hamburguer. Iterative logic. Spanish-English translation: PONER-PUT, pan inferior-botton bread, carne-meat, 2 VECES-2 REPETITIONS, pan superior-top bread
• Figure 4: Achievements for completing 1 and 10 conditional (IF) food orders
• Figure 5: Design of the playing zone: cooker's table