Communications - December 2009

are suitable for teaching CS subjects including many noncomputer games or games that are based on dedicated devices (for example, Lego robots). Our focus is on interactive graphical computer games. It is important to recognize that in the CS education arena the term “computer game” is often used to refer to the attempts at, and the results of, effective and meaningful integration of animated graphical visualization and various degrees of interactivity. Because of the unknown entertainment value, strictly speaking, much of these are interesting and innovative teaching materials and are not computer games in a commercial sense.

As discussed in Sung et al., 33 when examining recent efforts in integrating computer games into CS classes, we observe three general categories.

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Game development classes. 1. These are entire curricula, 7, 40 individual classes, 4, 6, 14, 31, 39 or capstone projects2, 29 designed specifically to develop new games as an end product. The education committee of the main professional organization for the games industry, The International Game Developer Association (IGDA), has proposed a comprehensive curriculum framework conveying the industry’s articulated desires for well-trained college graduates seeking jobs in the game industry. When evaluated against the IGDA curriculum framework, we see that these classes cover all the major core topic areas. Students in these classes must be concerned with all aspects of producing a real game including entertainment value, visual quality, audio effects, physics simulations, and real-time performance.

Game programming classes. 2. These are classes (for example, Kuffner’s CMU course37) designed specifically to study technical aspects and issues involved in building games. For example, topics covered may include event loops, path planning algorithms, and terrain representation. These classes typically do not require building an end product and the topics covered are general and usually are applicable to different domains. These classes concentrate on covering the game programming topic area in the IGDA curriculum framework.