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Game Development with a Serious Focus

Published: 21 February 2018 Publication History

Abstract

We report our experience teaching elective game development courses at two colleges at a public university. Over the past nine years these courses have been taught in a variety of languages on several platforms. As the courses evolved we introduced serious games with game-based-learning as a focus for the projects and ultimately offered a special topics elective in serious game development. In this paper, we discuss the merits of using serious games as a focus in game programming, including the benefits for students without a strong interest in gaming. We also describe the novel restructuring of one college's Computer Science elective sequence in response to recommendations from students, alumni, and an advisory board of computing professionals. By introducing 200-level electives, students are able to sample advanced topics including game development early in their academic sequence. This has led to involving more students in game-based undergraduate research which can result in increased interest and retention in Computer Science. We discuss our curriculum design and lessons learned including challenges and successes, and data from student surveys indicating student motivation and engagement.

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  • (2024)Taxonomy of Studies on the Use of Video Games in Entrepreneurship Education: A Systematic Literature Review with a Textometric AnalysisGames and Culture10.1177/15554120241273392Online publication date: 16-Aug-2024
  • (2023)A Video Game for Entrepreneurship Learning in Ecuador: Development StudyJMIR Formative Research10.2196/492637(e49263)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2023

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGCSE '18: Proceedings of the 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
February 2018
1174 pages
ISBN:9781450351034
DOI:10.1145/3159450
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 21 February 2018

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Author Tags

  1. curriculum design
  2. game development
  3. game-based learning
  4. serious games

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SIGCSE '18
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SIGCSE '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 161 of 459 submissions, 35%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,595 of 4,542 submissions, 35%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Taxonomy of Studies on the Use of Video Games in Entrepreneurship Education: A Systematic Literature Review with a Textometric AnalysisGames and Culture10.1177/15554120241273392Online publication date: 16-Aug-2024
  • (2023)A Video Game for Entrepreneurship Learning in Ecuador: Development StudyJMIR Formative Research10.2196/492637(e49263)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2023

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