developing or evaluating materials for adoption, it is essential to pay attention to the prerequisite knowledge. An ideal approach would be to clearly separate and hide the graphical and user interactivity functionality. In this way, faculty and students only need to concentrate on the core CS concepts.

Gender and expertise neutrality. ˲ As with any powerful tool, inappropriate use of games can backfire and result in further alienation of underrepresented groups. 20 It is important that the gaming materials are gender and expertise neutral. For example, it is important to avoid violence and unnecessary competitions. 26 The materials used should discourage the addition of superfluous “eye-candy” graphical enhancements, or user interaction programming by students with extensive prior programming experience. Doing so will help to avoid intimidating other less-experi-enced students.

Infrastructure support. ˲ Free and simple are the keywords here. Given the financial reality of most schools, all materials must be freely available; the associated institutional infrastructure requirements must be modest and straightforward.

Conceptual integrity. ˲ Our discussion focuses on the traditional CS courses. It is important to remember that ultimately, the goal is to facilitate students’ learning about the core CS concepts. Any dilution, even in favor of acquiescing to some students’ desire and motivation to become game developers, would do the students a disservice.

Textbook availability. ˲ As in all pioneering work, mature and well-organized materials are mostly under development. Although there are some textbooks available for specific approaches (for example, CS1/2, 11 computer graphics35), mostly, one must be ready to develop custom reading material to guide students along.

acknowledgments

This work is supported in part by the National Science Foundation grant DUE-0442420 and Microsoft Research under the Computer Gaming Curriculum in Computer Science RFP, Award Number 15871 and 16531. All opinions, findings, conclusions, and recommendations in this work are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the

views of the National Science Foundation or Microsoft.

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Kelvin Sung ( [e-mail]) is a professor in the department of Computing and Software Systems at the University of Washington, Bothell, WA.