Teaching OOP and COP Technologies via Gaming

Introduction

The game industry is growing rapidly. “The worldwide game industry reached $33.5 billion in size in 2005, with expected growth to $58.4 billion by 2007, a near doubling in size in a two-year period.” The hiring requirements at a typical game company are something on the order of 65% computer scientists, 30% artists, and 5% designers. In addition, government and non-game-industry corporations for the new area of serious games are also growing (Zyda, 2006). “Game-play has begun to surpass television viewing among some segments of the population. Video game development budgets are already the size of motion picture development budgets, on the order of $20 million to $100 million, with expected revenue for a hit game reaching from $250 million to more than $1 billion” (Zyda, 2007).

We would expect these data to show that the demand for computer scientists is increasing. However, internationally, computer science has experienced a 70% decrease in undergraduate enrollments since 2000 (Zyda, 2006). “Don’t just play games, create them!” has become an attractive and interesting innovation in computer science curriculum. Several universities have created game degrees, while a number of other universities have set up game tracks and/or courses. Actually teaching game development is valuable not only because students and the young generation are interested in games, but also because gaming itself has the potential to revitalize and increase interest in computer science (Zyda, 2006). First of all, games have a unique role in education. Games “do all of the things that the learning scientists told us worked well” (Schollmeyer, 2007). Games support the following effective learning paradigms identified by learning science: experiential learning (“If you do it, you learn it”); inquiry-based learning (“What happens when I do this?”); self-efficacy (“If you believe you can do it, you will try longer/harder, and you will succeed more often than you would otherwise”); goal setting (“You learn more if you are working toward a well-defined goal”); and cooperation (team learning) (Mayo, 2007). Secondly, games are the integration of humanity, mathematics, physics, arts, artificial intelligence, graphics, visualization, animation, sounds, images, programming, and so on. Gaming itself is becoming a science (Zyda, 2007). Consequently, teaching game developments will promote the further study of all sciences, especially mathematics and physics, programming skills, and problem-solving abilities.

Here, we are going to concentrate on the discussion of teaching programming knowledge and skills. The traditional way of teaching programming is going over one chapter for covering one topic, such as class, object, inheritance, polymorphism, and so on. Specifically made programming exercises are used to demonstrate and explain the individual concept. Unfortunately, this traditional approach misses the connections among the different topics, and students fail to see opportunities to put these technologies together to solve a real-world problem. The drawbacks of this pedagogical method often appear on students’ evaluations, such as “The program didn’t do anything cool” (only see some text outputs) or “no idea what it was doing” (change programs do not affect the output) (Phelps, Bierre, & Parks, 2003), due to the fact that students cannot see the effects of their programs intuitively. Games are based on graphics, visualization, and animation. Students can easily see the cause-and-effect relationship between their programs and the results in the format of graphics and animation. In addition, visualization and animation will further catch their attention and encourage their interests.

This idea has been demonstrated by many famous projects, such as “Logo,” “StarLOGO,” “Karel,” “Programmable Brick,” “Lego RCX Brick,” “Alice,” “MUPPETS,” and so on (Phelps et al., 2003; Bierre & Phelps, 2004). These excellent projects mainly create a 3D virtual environment for students to control a robot or a set of characters to visualize the programs’ effects, to extend and practice the programming skills, and to engage students’ efforts.