Comparative Analysis of Students’ Perceptions of Programming Puzzles: Parson’s and Wordle-Like

IEEE Access. 2026. Vol. 14. P. 37487–37508.

Varnavsky A.

Puzzles are an excellent tool for learning computer science and programming, fostering increased interest, engagement, and motivation among students, as well as developing logical, critical, and computational thinking. Among beginner programmers, Parson's Programming Puzzles are quite popular, aimed at mastering the basic syntactic and logical constructs of programming languages. However, as students' skills grow, their interest in Parson's puzzles may decline. In such cases, it is necessary to use other types of puzzles. Word puzzles contribute to the development of vocabulary, working memory, and other cognitive abilities, making them useful supplements to the learning process. We adapted the game "Wordle" and created Wordle-like Programming Puzzles. These puzzles were deployed on a chatbot system. The study focuses on a comparative analysis of students' perception of Wordle-like Programming Puzzles and Parson's Programming Puzzles in terms of interest, difficulty, and usefulness. The experiment was conducted among first-year university students studying the Python programming language. Using the elbow method, we identified four clusters. In each of the clusters we analyzed the interest, difficulty, and perceived usefulness of the puzzles, as well as the students' background and current academic performance. Our results showed that students' backgrounds significantly influence their perception of both PP and WP. Students with low programming skills level tend to show greater interest in PP, while students with high skills level prefer WP. We also noted that in clusters where there is a high interest in WP, the level of interest in PP is generally low, and vice versa. Overall, the perception scores for WP were higher than those for PP.

Keywords: serious games, серьезные игры, чат-боты, chatbots, Wordle, Wordle-like programming puzzles, Parson’s programming puzzles, Головоломки Парсонса

Publication based on the results of: Разработка и исследование эффективности использования виртуального игрового педагогического агента для обучения программированию и развития навыков hard и soft skills (2022)