Read, Write, Play: An Educational Mobile Gaming Platform

We introduce ALE, a new framework for writing games for the Android platform. The primary motivation behind ALE is to emphasize reading code before writing it. Beginners read game code to learn how levels can be made, and advanced users read the code of ALE itself to learn how to create useful and extensible libraries. To date, roughly 200 students at our university have used ALE, ranging from first-semester engineering undergraduates through Masters students. ALE has proven useful in teaching non-majors about CS, in making introductory CS programming courses more exciting, and in encouraging creativity, entrepreneurship, and good program design in upper-level electives. Based on these experiences, we encourage educators at all levels to consider using ALE to improve students’ ability to learn by reading code.