Recursion is a notoriously difficult concept for many students to comprehend (Er, 1984), as it involves tackling problems in a new way, as more conditions and actions must be performed outside of a central algorithm (Baron 2024). In order to ease this learning experience, we sought to create an educational game focused on teaching recursive principles to introductory computer science students.

Our student-developed educational game, Noisrucer, has been developed to analyze the way that students approach foundational concepts in recursive programming. By presenting these problems in a naturalized, and rational manner, the game seeks to demystify the persistent issues that hinder development. Noisrucer strives to deliver a challenging, and captivating experience through its intuitive gameplay and visually stimulating features. Educational games are oftentimes difficult to develop (Castronova et al, 2008), requiring players to cover a broad curriculum or engage in unintuitive gameplay. Our game seeks to circumvent these issues, providing players with their own agency to solve problems in new and creative ways that mimics programming itself. This is supplemented through student-driven ideas to help engage their generation z peers, aligning with other scholars calls for use of technology (Szymkowiak et al, 2021) nurturing their engagement with a sense of reward and using a mastery approach to learning.

Through the use of a small classroom observation of 8 students as well as individual observational pilot playthroughs with four participants, we have found that tactile responsiveness and fluid interactions maintained engagement and interest. Though we have also found that participants collaborating as part of a group exhibited significantly more interest, engaging in exploratory behavior and motivating each to experiment with different solutions. We are actively making changes to reinforce these positive behaviors in order to measure their effect on learning and hope to discuss these with the greater student community.