# The Use of Educational Games in Programming Assignments: SQL Island as a Case Study
## 1 Introduction  
Serious games, and more specifically educational games, are considered an important asset for the teaching and learning process nowadays. The use of games in the educational process increases students' motivation [1; 2] and engagement [3], while it also enhances their performance [2].  
The advantages of educational games are considered important for the teaching and learning of programming, which is a cognitively demanding field of knowledge causing various difficulties to students. This has resulted in a great number of serious or else educational games for various aspects of programming [4; 5]. Some of these games are open source [6], and this gives the possibility of extending and/or adjusting them to the special needs of a specific class. However, as [PERSON] and [PERSON] note, _\"the amount of studies on educational games for teaching programming is low in the scientific literature\"_[6] (p. 1). Moreover, in several studies, the educational context is not adequately described or is completely missing, or the participants are volunteers, and the study takes place as a side activity of a course. Consequently, there is a need for more studies that report experiences of utilizing games for teaching and learning programming in real classroom settings [7; 8]. Specifically, research is required both in terms of the features that an educational game for programming should exhibit and the ways that it can be successfully integrated into the learning process.  
The study presented in this article was designed to contribute to the limited research in the field [9; 10; 11] by investigating the outcomes of utilizing an educational game in the context of a compulsory undergraduate course on Web programming. Specifically, thestudy aimed to investigate the outcomes of using an educational game, such as SQL Island [12] or SQL Mystery Murder [13], in the context of a programming assignment. SQL Island [12] was selected as a case study since it is freely available online; it includes several SQL statements utilized in the course and provides a personalized certificate if a user successfully completes the game. In order to contribute to the research on the challenges in designing and successfully integrating educational games in formal education, we studied: the perceived player experience and short-term learning using the MEEGA+ model [14]; students' performance in the game; features that are important for games utilized in programming assignments.  
The rest of the article is organized as follows. Section 2 presents a review of research on educational games for teaching and learning SQL, as well as a brief comparison of freely available educational games for SQL programming. Section 3 summarizes important information for the methodology of the study: the context of the study; the participants; the research questions; the instruments used for data collection and analysis. Section 4 presents the results, which are discussed in Section 5. In Section 6, the main conclusions of the study are summarized, along with its limitations and plans for future research.