Teaching computer programming is an important task in the formation of computer scientists. Being a subject taught in the first years of student degrees, need to properly motivate students, so they try, at home, to learn by themselves, complementing that way their classes. This chapter proposes an approach to computer programming teaching based on the construction of videogames, using state of the art game frameworks. The author will show how the task of writing a game using a common framework deals with the basic programming concepts that are usually taught on a first course on computer programming, namely on object oriented programming languages like C# or Java: algebraic operations with variables, methods declaration, objects definition, objects hierarchy and multidimensional arrays. As it will be shown, even the common order of concepts presentation during the course can be kept, although applying them to computer games instead of the usually requested exercises.
TopIntroduction
Teaching computer programming is a complex task. Not just because the need of complex reasoning needed for a student to learn how to develop an algorithm and code it, but also because of the lack of catchy feedback.
We all know that currently teenagers are in the smartphone era, used to touch in an icon and see a nice application appear. Later, in the computer programming classes, they are asked to implement an algorithm to sort numbers or strings, and print them in the console. This makes the student struggle, on whether programming is too hard, or the teacher too lame.
More recently, teachers use visual tools, like Forms. Nevertheless, we are still speaking on standard grey windows, feeling like accounting applications.
Trying to tackle this problem, some teachers already try to ask students to perform more interesting tasks, like the generation of images, web pages and, a minority, computer games. I am involved in teaching at two different universities in Portugal, and in both there are approaches related to programming games.
For example, in the last years, at University of Minho (Braga, Portugal), students are asked to implement a game in their functional course, when learning Haskell. The projects were first based in an implementation of Carcassonne (Schend, 2007), using mostly the console; in the next year the project was slightly different, with the implementation of LightBot (Yaroslavski, 2014) game, simulating it using X3Dom (Behr, Eschler, Jung, & Zöllner, 2009); and this year, the project was the implementation of the Sokoban (Falcon Corporation, 2016) game, using the Gloss Haskell library (Lippmeier, 2010) for simple game development. Although these projects (mostly the latest two) resulted in some interesting projects, by better students, the whole class was dedicated to implement simple functions to process strings (filters, from a board and a move, generating a new board) and only in the final assignment students really see something moving. Therefore, when those better students get to the final assignment, their motivation raises exponentially, but those we have difficulties never get to see anything fancy, and get demotivated. I still defend this approach to be better than in previous years, but it is not the best (but probably the possible when learning a language like Haskell).
In the other hand, at Instituto Politécnico do Cávado e do Ave (Barcelos, Portugal), there is a grade dedicated to the development of computer games. When teaching to those students, that are highly motivated for computer games development, I used some game programming frameworks, and it seems that their use might be a good approach to teach object oriented programming basics to first years students. And this statement is not based only on the eye candy feedback students receive, but because it is easy to focus on standard learning concepts when developing a computer game.
In this chapter I will focus on my point of view on how teaching object oriented programming can be done resourcing to a game-programming framework. To illustrate how I see it, I will use two different programming languages (although based on a same paradigm and a virtual machine): C# and Java. And for each one I chose a game development framework: the MonoGame Framework (Chamillard, 2015) (the open-source fork of XNA (Sung, 2013)) for the C# language, and LibGDX Framework (Cook, 2015) for the Java language. This way I will be able to demonstrate how basic OO programming concepts can be taught using different languages, and different platforms: from Windows native applications to Android applications.
The remaining of this chapter will be divided in the following sections: