# The Use of Educational Games in Programming Assignments: SQL Island as a Case Study
## 3 Methods
### Data Collection and Analysis  
Two main sources of data were collected and analyzed to investigate the RQs of the study: students' performance in the assignments, including the one based on SQL Island; students' responses in an online questionnaire delivered as a Google form that was filled in after the experience with the SQL Island game.  
The questionnaire was based on the MHEGA+ model that was proposed by [PERSON] et al. [PERSON] et al. (2014) as an instrument for evaluating educational games. The reliability and validity ([PERSON]'s alpha \(\alpha\) = 0.927) of the model have been confirmed by data collected from 62 case studies with 1048 students, as well as the evaluation of 19 experts in educational games [PERSON] et al. (2014). The MHEGA+ model has two main dimensions of evaluation, namely player experience and short-term learning. The player experience dimension is divided into several sub-dimensions. Based on this model, a questionnaire was proposed by [PERSON] et al. [PERSON] et al. (2014) that was further amended and resulted in the questionnaire used in the presented study that consists of:  
* Demographics questions (8 questions) including: sex; year of studies; non-digital games habits; digital-games habits; prior experience with serious/educational games; perceived knowledge of SQL (prior the assignment); statement of game completion; duration of gameplay.
* Player experience questions (27 questions). The player experience questions can be divided into the following dimensions: usability; confidence; challenge; satisfaction; fun; focused attention; relevance. Usability is further divided into: aesthetics; learnability; operability; accessibility; error prevention and recovery.
* Short-term learning questions (7 questions).
* Advantages and disadvantages of SQL Island and proposals for its utilization (3 open-type questions).  
The questions on player experience and short-term learning were actually statements for which the participants were asked to express their degree of agreement on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree, 2 = disagree, 3 = indifferent, 4 = agree, 5 = strongly agree). For these questions, descriptive statistics were used (mean, standard deviation, and median), and the results were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively.  
The open-type questions regarding the advantages and disadvantages of SQL Island and its potential educational usage aimed at investigating important issues both for the design and pedagogical usage of SQL Island, but even more importantly, serious games for programming. Students' responses to these questions were analyzed using elements of phenomenographic Students (2013) and content analysis Students (2013); Students (2013). Representative keywords and phrases were highlighted using different colors in the Excel file that included the student responses collected from the Google form. This process was repeated several times until the main categories came to surface. Student responses were revisited and classified under the formulated categories that were based on students' own words. After making several iterations and considering the classification solid, frequencies and percentages were  
Figure 2: Distribution of students based on their year of studies.  
calculated in order to have a clear picture of the main student trends/perceptions on the issues investigated.