Investigating studio-based learning in a course on game design

  • Authors:

  • Anthony Estey;Jeremy Long;Bruce Gooch;Amy A. Gooch

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Victoria, Victoria, B.C., Canada;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 Fifth International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Jobs in the computing field demand communication and teamwork skills in addition to programming skills. Focus at the undergraduate level needs to be shifted towards developing these collaborative skills to enable a more smooth transition into employment in industry. The University of Victoria is in its second year of offering a course on game design. In the first offering, new activities were introduced to address issues identified by recent studies on university graduates entering industry. We focused on integrating cooperative learning, group orientation, and peer review activities into the game design process. The course attracted students across multiple disciplines, and an analysis indicated increased student interest in pursuing a computer science degree. Unfortunately, the same pre- and post-surveys suggested that our collaborative activities may have resulted in a decrease in student interest regarding course work and in pursuing studies in game design. In this paper we report on how we used a studio-based pedagogical approach to restructure the peer review activities in our course. In our previous offering, students received peer feedback only on their final game presentation. In our latest offering, we integrated peer review activities into every step of the game development process, allowing students to refine their ideas while progressing through a game project. A quantitative analysis informs us that our refined peer review activities were successful in increasing student presentation confidence, sense of community, and excitement towards their course projects.