Studies have found serious games to be good tools for programming education. As an outcome from such research, several game solutions for learning computer programming have appeared. Most of these games are only used in the research field where only a few are published and made available for the public. There are however numerous examples of programming games in commercial stores that have reached a large audience.This article presents a systematic review of publicly available and popular programming games. It analyses which fundamental software development concepts, as defined by the ACM/IEEE Computer Science Curricula, are represented in these games and identifies game design patterns used to represent these concepts.This study shows that fundamental programming concepts and programming methods have a good representation in mainstream games. There is however a lack of games addressing data structures, algorithms and design. There is a strong domination of puzzle games. Only two of the 20 studied games belong to a different genre. The eleven game design patterns identified in this study have potential to contribute to future efforts in creating engaging serious games for programming education.

中文翻译：

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主流编程游戏中的模式

研究发现严肃的游戏是编程教育的好工具。这些研究的结果是，出现了一些用于学习计算机编程的游戏解决方案。这些游戏中的大多数仅用于研究领域，只有少数游戏已发布并可供公众使用。但是，在商业商店中有许多编程游戏的例子，它们已经吸引了大批读者。本文对公开发售和流行的编程游戏进行了系统的回顾。它分析了ACM / IEEE计算机科学课程定义的哪些基本软件开发概念在这些游戏中得到了表示，并确定了用来表示这些概念的游戏设计模式。这项研究表明，基本的编程概念和编程方法在这些游戏中具有良好的表示能力。主流游戏。但是，缺少解决数据结构，算法和设计的游戏。益智游戏占据着主导地位。在研究的20种游戏中，只有两种属于不同类型。在这项研究中确定的11种游戏设计模式有可能有助于为创建引人入胜的严肃游戏进行编程教育的未来努力。