Strengthening the Case for Pair Programming
IEEE Software
Teaching software engineering through game design
ITiCSE '05 Proceedings of the 10th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
Re-thinking computer literacy in post-secondary education
Proceedings of the 14th Western Canadian Conference on Computing Education
Alice first: 3D interactive game programming
ITiCSE '09 Proceedings of the 14th annual ACM SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
Teaching programming concepts to high school students with alice
FIE'09 Proceedings of the 39th IEEE international conference on Frontiers in education conference
Using scalable game design to teach computer science from middle school to graduate school
Proceedings of the fifteenth annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
Minimizing to maximize: an initial attempt at teaching introductory programming using Alice
Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges
Learning to Program with Alice (w/ CD ROM)
Learning to Program with Alice (w/ CD ROM)
Engaging students by intertwining puzzle-based and problem-based learning
Proceedings of the 13th annual conference on Information technology education
Using video game development to engage undergraduate students of assembly language programming
Proceedings of the 14th annual ACM SIGITE conference on Information technology education
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The challenges that instructors face attempting to motivate novice programming students are amplified when the students are not pursuing degrees or careers in computer science. For the programming module of our course for non-computer science majors we assigned a video game programming deliverable that we expected would engage students and enhance their experiences. After extensive analyses of the survey responses of 245 enrolled students we were surprised to learn that, although the majority believed the game programming experience enhanced their learning overall, another majority reported that the project itself was not enjoyable. Through qualitative analysis we have identified several key areas that seem to have detracted from the overall level of enjoyment, and in this paper we follow this investigation with discussion surrounding how these issues could be remedied in the future. These recommended strategies will bolster student enjoyment and motivation in future offerings and we believe this discussion will prove very useful to other instructors planning to employ game programming components.