Addressing industry issues in a multi-disciplinary course on game design

  • Authors:

  • Anthony Estey;Amy Gooch;Bruce Gooch

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Victoria, Victoria, B.C., Canada;University of Victoria, Victoria, B.C., Canada;University of Victoria, Victoria, B.C., Canada

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Foundations of Digital Games
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Over the past few years, games courses have been gaining in popularity, as there has been growing evidence showing positive enrollment and student engagement results. Nevertheless, new graduates still lack critical teamwork and problem-solving skills required by industry employers. Building upon other game programs that had successful results, we present a game design course developed to attract students of all disciplines. Our course is different because we focus on three main issues directly associated with new graduates entering industry: cooperative learning, peer review, and orientation with a pre-existing large code base. A quantitative analysis reveals both a positive and negative impact on students' interests, in particular within a cohort of non-Computer Science majors. A qualitative analysis reveals the ways in which students were influenced by a course design where assessment was aligned with key industry issues.