Abstract

Game development is quickly gaining popularity in introductory programming courses. Motivational and educational aspects of game development are hard to balance and often sacrifice principled educational goals. We are employing the notion of scalable game design as an approach to broaden participation by shifting the pedagogical focus from specific programming to more general design comprehension. Scalable game design combines the Flow psychological model, the FIT competency framework and the AgentSheets rapid game prototyping environment. The scalable aspect of our approach has allowed us to teach game design in a broad variety of contexts with students ranging from elementary school to CS graduate students, with projects ranging from simple Frogger-like to sophisticated Sims-like games, and with diverse cultures from the USA, Europe and Asia.

Keywords

Game designPopularityComputer scienceScalabilityVariety (cybernetics)Video game developmentGame DeveloperGame art designGame programmingGame design documentLevel designGame mechanicsVideo game designSimple (philosophy)MultimediaHuman–computer interactionArtificial intelligencePsychology

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Publication Info

Year
2008
Type
article
Volume
40
Issue
1
Pages
305-309
Citations
25
Access
Closed

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Cite This

Alexander Repenning, Andri Ioannidou (2008). Broadening participation through scalable game design. ACM SIGCSE Bulletin , 40 (1) , 305-309. https://doi.org/10.1145/1352322.1352242

Identifiers

DOI
10.1145/1352322.1352242