Developing a Gaming Curriculum

Now that we have a clue about the student who will be enrolling in our programming courses, I thought I’d move to the other end of the spectrum, that is, toward developing a gaming curriculum.

The middle part of this spectrum is really the basis of this blog, that is, how do we use gaming content to teach programming concepts, but it does help to know what the end result may be.

This blog entry will summarize a thesis on:

Power and Peril of Teaching Game Programming
By Maic Masuch and Lennart Nacke

The authors introduced two different approaches to game development for computer science students at two universities (University of Magdeburg, Germany, and University of Otago, New Zealand) in different countries and social contexts.

Based on the feedback from these university studies, a wide range of benefits include:

- Motivation - Games turned out to be a motivational source second to none.
- Versality and interdisciplinarity - game development inherently requires input from many disciplines: programming, design, sound, business, and many more.
- Self-contained projects - Knowing that they are working towards a product is intensely motivating for students as they can possibly include it in their portfolio and use it for future job applications.
- Practical experience - After finishing the project work at university this experience can also be used by entrepreneurial students to start their own spin-off company.
- Teamwork - students learn how to work in teams by a group-project based teaching curriculum.

As we all know, in addition to benefits come challenges and problems:

- Claim vs. capability - For most students a game is simply a larger software project; while trying to compete with popular game titles they underestimate the amount of work and the capabilities needed for completion by an order of several magnitudes.
- Interdisciplinary teamwork - it is important that every member identifies himself with the task assigned and the team.
- Missing focus and complexity of projects - focus should be set on specific aspects of a game.
- No experience and use of wrong tools – begin software evaluation at least one semester early, preferably with a well documented prototype.

Conclusion:

Computer games have an enormous potential in teaching and research.

Games are exceptionally well in
- motivating students,
- teach them interdisciplinary teamwork and
- give them hands-on experience in multimedia integration.


Some practical hands-on advice for people who are planning similar courses:
- focus on either game programming or game design, not both.
- ensure equal levels of programming experience and capabilities.
- students should not start to learn tools while in production – use crash courses in advance of the lecture for preparation.
- do not allow different platforms, engines, languages or tools – students should help each other.
- have fun!!

Based on this thesis, it shows that students are motivated to learn programming and other skills by developing games. This is exactly where I'm headed with this idea with the current programming curriculum at my school. Using games to introduce programming concepts may be a motivating factor in getting students to enroll in these courses. More to come...

Reference:

Masuch, M. & Nacke, L (2004) Power and Peril of Teaching Game Programming http://thesis.pxfx.de/Masuch-Nacke-PowerPeril.pdf