Seamless Integration of Coding and Gameplay: Writing Code Without Knowing it

Numerous designers and researchers have called for seamless integration of education and play in educational games. In the domain of games that teach coding, seamless integration has not been achieved. We present a system (The Orb Game) to demonstrate an extreme level of integration: in which the coding is so seamlessly integrated that players do not realize they are coding. Our evaluation shows that the integration was successful: players felt that they were playing a game and did not realize they were programming. We also present a generalized framework called Programming by Gaming (PbG) to guide the design of other such games.