As I continue my research for more Microsoft XNA studies, I found this interesting article that gives gaming feedback from the perspective of the faculty. At first, I thought it was a deviation from my research, but as I continued to read this article, I found that many of the points hit home with my desire to hook students into programming. This article gave me several gears to think about as I search for gaming components into the curriculum. This article does utilize Microsoft XNA as the platform used.
Before I continue, I’d like to share why this article touched home with me. When I was an undergraduate student, I learned to program on very large mainframe computers. Imagine card punches and hoppers. Of course, as time progressed and I entered industry, computing migrated away from mainframes and began distributive computing. PCs became the norm, of course linked to a server to program my projects. I’ve developed many things, modem software, artificial intelligence, robotics, payroll systems, etc. Nowhere in my assigned projects did I ever develop gaming software. Note that I’ve always enjoyed playing games, but I haven’t been on the forefront to develop gaming software.
Now, onto the study:
Game Themed Programming Assignments: The Faculty Perspective
Kelvin Sung
University of Washington, Bothell
Michael Panitz
Cascadia Community College
Scott Wallace
Washington State University, Vancouver
Ruth Anderson
University of Washington, Seattle
John Nordlinger
Microsoft Research
http://faculty.washington.edu/ksung/pub/2008.sigcse53-sung.pdf
The authors begin with promoting their previous research in teaching computer games. They became inspired by the positive feedback they received from students and industry so they began to observe faculty that had little or no gaming/graphics experience.
In today’s society, students demand multimedia experiences, i.e., real time interaction in a visual environment. The authors noted, “Because existing results demonstrating that students' needs can be met and that the learning outcomes can be achieved, our work focuses on the needs of the faculty.”
The authors have two objectives in this study:
· First, develop materials that are suitable for adoption. In essence, the faculty could pick and choose within these materials to combine them with their current curriculum.
· Second, adopt the materials in existing courses and study the following: faculty effort; student learning outcome; and student engagement.
I am more focused on what effort was required of the faculty that used these items as well as student learning outcomes and engagement. I’m willing to put the effort into this gaming curriculum, but does it pay off in student learning outcomes and engagement?
Design Considerations:
The following are the categories the authors used when designing this game material. It’s relevant due to the fact that the faculty were required to implement these changes:
Institutional Oversight: Department committee consensus is often required for significant changes to the core courses. It can be challenging to arrive at a consensus, so each project was self-contained that did not require a complete rewrite of the entire curriculum.
Material Neutrality: It is important that the materials built are gender and expertise neutral. For example, it is important to avoid violence (shooting), and unnecessary competitions.
Academic Integrity: The authors stated, “The goal of this work is to facilitate students' learning about core CS concepts. Any dilution, in favor of even acquiescing to their motivation as game developers, would do the students a disservice.”
The Platform
The study indicated that platform selected to utilize these gaming components would be the C# programming language and the Microsoft XNA framework. This was selected by the fact that C#, XNA, and Microsoft's Games Studio Express combination is the only publicly and freely available solution that provides seamless integration of the development environment, programming language, GUI API, and graphics API. Students like FREE.
Due to the fact that this study was conducted for the faculty that had little or no previous experience with gaming development, each assignment had a console-based and a gamed-theme solution. This way, faculty who may feel comfortable with console-based games could make a slow transition to the same game based on a gamed-theme version. The problem came just making sure that the two solutions were equivalent.
The authors included an implementation tutorial that took the faculty step-by-step into the gamed-theme version. Many of the faculty in this study understood the concepts used in the console-based game, but were unable to make the leap to the game-themed version without assistance.
Assessment
Feedback from the faculty on using these assignments was posted via a custom evaluation form.
The focus of the evaluations was assessed on two areas:
a) Quality of the assignment, which focuses on the technical equivalence between the console and game-themed assignments, and the supporting materials (e.g., pre/post test, etc.).
b) Potential for adoption, which focuses on the factors that may prevent adoption of high quality assignments.
Based on the review feedback, the assignments were well received overall. For those assignments that received lower scores, the assignment were revised and reassessed.
The authors stated, “As expected, all of the low scores were caused by game-themed assignments.” The reasons for this are:
· Differences in difficulties: initial game-themed assignments are often too difficult, complex, or intimidating.
· Inappropriate use of concept: designing assignments around negative results from game play is a bad.
· Deficiency in support: the development team often overlooked important details. For example, in the beginning, a specialized hardware controller was the only way to control a game. This problem was remedied with keyboard simulation.
When the authors received consistently lower scores in the potential for adoption area, they became aware that the language issue must be addressed for wide adoption.
Since both versions of any given assignment covered identical technical topics, the hope was that faculty would adopt the game-themed version transparently. The authors were interested in verifying that the game-themed assignments would not require extra resources from the faculty, that they would achieve similar student learning outcomes, and that they would increase student interest and engagement.
In Conclusion
The study was very relevant to my research because the authors clearly stated, “We must verify that we can replace individual console-based assignment with the corresponding game-themed assignment without negative impact.”
In addition, this study was focused on, “one of the major motivations of our work is to further engage students via interesting and/or relevant assignments.”
This study is still going on as we “speak”. The early results indicate that the students enjoyed the assignments that used gaming specifications; however, not ALL assignments were games. In fact, most courses in this study only utilized 2 to 3 games per semester.
The faculty involved in this study (and I would have loved to participated!) were receptive to these new game-themed assignments, but the learning curve was difficult since most faculty have many other irons in the fire to deal with, much less to learn a new gaming system.
My thought is that I wouldn’t transform the entire introductory course to game-based programming, but introduce a few games here and there each semester.
Several faculty here at SFC have indicated that if we only teach gaming, won’t gaming become boring as well? That thought does hold some validity and upholds my thought of only using a few games per semester.
I will continue my research with Microsoft XNA and report any findings. In the meantime, if you do teach programming using a game-themed curriculum, please share your thoughts and findings with me. I’d love to see where you are and where you’re headed.
--Debbie
References:
Sung, K., Panitz, M., Wallace, S., Anderson, R. Nordlinger, J., (2008). "Game Themed Programming Assignments: The Faculty Perspective", from http://faculty.washington.edu/ksung/pub/2008.sigcse53-sung.pdf
Friday, April 3, 2009
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Debbie,
ReplyDeleteYou point out that the "study was conducted for the faculty that had little or no previous experience with gaming development." I have mixed feelings about this: game development involves more than the programming elements. Successful game development requires knowledge of narrative, challenge and competition, play archetypes, and a host of other pieces to make games compelling. It's easy to make a lame game, but that would serve to turn people off to game design or programming or both.
Having worked on several game titles, I recall my research experiences that had nothing to do with programming but everything to do with play. For example, my company created a game called "Saboteur Klown" which was a puzzle game based on the idea of defusing multiple bombs. The programming team spent weeks in the library (pre widespread use of the Internet!) researching both modern and classical puzzles, then determining how to convert them into the context of our story. The programming was (relatively) trivial after we got everything else figured out.
Did the study make any mention of mentoring or training faculty in elements of game play outside of programming? How would you recommend bringing faculty into the mindset of entertainment application development as opposed to productivity application development, for example?
- Hap Aziz
Hi Debbie,
ReplyDeleteVery interesting post. I found Hap's response really interesting too. Why didn't I immediately think of this: "game development involves more than the programming elements. Successful game development requires knowledge of narrative, challenge and competition, play archetypes, and a host of other pieces to make games compelling."
Creating a game is like writing a novel -- and we all realize that writing a good story is a lot more than knowing how to type in a word processor and knowing grammar and spelling. But we seem to lose sight of these things as soon as someone says "computer" or "technology." Suddenly, using the technology becomes the most important thing and all the other aspects of design (be it creating a game, writing a textbook, etc.) become secondary or are not considered at all.
I said something similar in my response to Kelly's post this week -- that there is more to art and music than digitally emulating what an artist or a musician does. When CDs first came out, I always said that, even though the sounds might be clearer than scratchy records or worn out tapes, the music still was not as evocative or compelling for me on CD. Just tonight my daughter told me that she heard that people are beginning to collect old LPs because the music sounds so much better than the digitally remastered versions.
Well, its late and I'm starting to ramble. But thank you for such a thorough and thoughtful post.
Liz