Abstract

Many incoming college freshmen have accumulated a significant number of hours of experience playing computer games. Extending that experience to actual game creation activities can be highly motivational for these students. Most of these activities require some level of programming expertise, however, making them activities too advanced for the majority of incoming students. In this paper, we describe a freshman-level course called Problem Solving through Game Creation. Students learn to use a number of drag-and-drop game creation tools to develop both 2D and 3D games, with no programming required in the course. We also cover a variety of other topics and tools related to game development. Our experience has been that students enjoy the course, but we have more formal course goals as well. Specifically, we hope to motivate students to declare and complete the computer science major and to better prepare students for the initial required computer science courses. We describe these goals in detail and discuss the process we have initiated to continually evaluate achievement of those goals.

Citations