CONCLUSION

With the development of economy and technology, the demand for talents in the CS field is increasing in contemporary society, but the fact that a big number of California undergraduate freshmen without programming experiences failing to major in CS or graduate by successfully passing the introductory course of Python learning causes talent shortage which makes the situation in California worse. In the past fifty years, plenty of scholars began doing research to help college students succeed in CS learning.

Most of these scholars used to emphasize the effects of extrinsic motivation by designing learning activities and curriculum to extrinsically motivate students to learn CS. However, in recent years, the experiment results and investigative questionnaires showed that intrinsic motivation plays a critical role in California undergraduate freshmen’s Python learning. Moreover, the recent trend shows that the emerging research area is centered in self-determination theory (SDT) because educational solutions designed based on SDT show the most effective results among California undergraduate freshmen’s Python learning outcomes.

In this way, this proposal introduces a RPG game that can take advantage of SDT’s theoretical framework to transfer students’ Python learning from being extrinsically motivated to intrinsically motivated. Even though there are potential limitations in this learning product, the analysis made in this proposal shows there are feasible methods to overcome these challenges. Therefore, designing a RPG game which emphasizes accessibility, continuity and scenario as the educational product is expected to be a good fit to solve the problem of California undergraduate freshmen without programming experience having difficulties to master the knowledge and concepts in Python learning.