international case blasts perspectives on teaching games-related subjects presented in handy...

International Case Blasts

Perspectives on teaching games-related subjects presented in handy bite-sized chunks

Speakers have 5 minutes to introduce themselves and present their cases

Q&A for the speakers at the end (IF we have time left)

Take-Away: an overview of different approaches to games education

Your Moderator:

Dan Hodgson Northumbria University in Newcastle,

UK BSc Computer Games Software

Engineering (www.gamesdegree.com) Head of “Student Outreach” for IGDA

ED SIG

Case 1: Rob Miles

Lecturer in Computer Science – University of Hull

www.robmiles.com

Module manager for First Year C# programming course at Hull

Teaching Programming

Learning to program is hard

Teaching programming is hard

Need to motivate and enthuse

Teaching with Games

Games are great for teaching

Students are strongly motivated to write them

They also provide a good context for programming examples

What we are doing at Hull

Make a text based game in semester 1 Simple snake game

Move that onto a console in semester 2 2D "Snake on a Plane"

Start a games programming club for advanced students

How it works

The C# model for XNA is very easy to use

Students are encouraged to factor their text apps to make it easy to map onto the XNA framework

Results so far

Students like it Even the ones not on the Games

Programming Courses We can teach some nice theory

From algorithms to events to OO design Marking assignments is much more fun!

Get the student to let us play their game....

Find Out More

Presentations and sample code (and dodgy blog)

www.robmiles.com/xna