DESIGNING AND CREATING A GAME ENGINE FOR USE IN THE CLASSROOM

Teaching fundamental programming to freshmen is a hard task to be performed, given the high level of abstraction and logical reasoning that are required for these students to develop in a very early stage of their course. This paper presents a discussion about this topic, along with a case study where computer games are meant to be developed by students in a first programming course, through the use of a game engine which allow students to develop fundamental programming skills without having to learn syntax and idiosyncrasies of any programming language.

2005

This thesis focuses on game development and educational benefits gained from teaching games to university students. First, it sketches the complex pipeline of tasks inherent in game development with focus on used tools. Classifying the many diverse tools used by different kinds of game developers helps to identify areas of employment within game development. A discussion of educational facilities and the specific niches of game development that they focus on, allows the conclusion that many games created there only reach up to a prototypic level. Thus, requirements for a game prototyping tool are derived. The author then provides estimated solutions for these needs with an extraordinary focus on the usefulness for computer science students. This leads to an implementation of a game prototyping tool, which brings the applications of the multimedia environment SQUEAK into play. After showing the educational benefits of Squeak, one can find out about some examples of educational game development with its help. This brings further information on the game engine that was used as an essential part of the prototyping tool created for this thesis. Finally, an analysis of advantages and disadvantages of using Squeak for educational game development is done. Also, prospects and possibilities for extending the prototyping tool are discussed

University of Magdeburg, Magdeburg, 2004

2008

Anything that combines aspects of play, challenge and conflict can be seen as a game. Therefore, games provide a versatile but demarcated setting for education. From the students' perspective the concept of 'game' is familiar, approachable and diverse, which makes it motivating for them. From the teachers' point of view, a game can serve as a mixing pot for various study subjects. For example, making a game can concretise study topics as well as work practices and on-the-fly collaboration across many different disciplines. Therefore, games as an educational form seem to suit to situations where the study material cannot be partitioned into strict independent fragments. Because our areas of teaching are digital arts and software development, it is natural to instruct students using computer games projects.

Computer science is gradually changing, evolving and adapting according to the needs of each time period by incorporating the technological developments available. However, despite the occurring changes and the current progress in the domain, computer programming is still a vital chapter within computer science, and its teaching remains a difficult endeavour. On the other hand, students have changed the way with which they learn, interact with and search for knowledge. They spend significant amounts of their everyday lives from a very young age interacting with the computers by playing games. Thus, they are used to environments with impressive special effects and graphical interfaces where they have full control of the situation and interact with the environment's elements. Therefore, today's teachers are trying to connect computer programming learning with students' everyday usage of the computer, which does not include simple textual editors for programming lines of code with no other interaction functionalities. Hence, teachers face the challenge of incorporating environments that are similar to students' existing mentality and of creating tasks and assignments that can be executed within these environments and can provide students with the necessary programming knowledge and skills. A number of software solutions were developed towards facing the aforementioned difficulties. They can be classified into three main categories, namely educational programming environments, microworlds and educational games. Educational games used in computer programming courses are considered to present added value, due to their ability to motivate students towards actively participating in the learning process and to support high levels of interaction, group work and critical thinking. Thus, we have developed an educational game that aims to further enhance computer programming education by addressing occurring problems. This paper aims to introduce and elaborate on a holistic framework that has been constructed as a guide towards the development of this game. To this end, we collect documented difficulties identified in computer programming learning and teaching and study existing frameworks that have been proposed for the development of software solutions for computer programming courses and for the development of successful serious games that do not however focus on computer programming education. This information is thoroughly studied and refined and results in the proposed framework that could also be employed for the design and development of other future educational games focusing on computer programming education.

Educational games development process includes all the stages of software devel-opment process. But there are important specific problems of educational games development to be solved related to the way of integration of educational content to the game and technologies of its im-plementation. In this paper we describe the approach which we propose as a method for achieving this aim. We give evidence of how that method should be used and an example of how we have implemented this approach specifically in developing a computer game to teach object oriented architecture.

Computer science is continuously evolving during the past decades. This has also brought forth new knowledge that should be incorporated and new learning strategies must be adopted for the successful teaching of all sub-domains. For example, computer programming is a vital knowledge area within computer science with constantly changing curriculum and its teaching remains a difficult endeavour. On the other hand, students start from a very early age to interact with computers through games and other entertaining multimedia software. Therefore, they seem to be keen on environments with impressive special effects and graphical interfaces where they interact with the environment's elements. In response, teachers are trying to connect computer programming learning with computer operations that students are familiar with, which does not include textual editors for programming lines of code with no other interaction. Educational games used in computer programming courses are considered to benefit learning, because they motivate students towards actively participating and interacting with the game's activities. Thus, we have developed an educational multiplayer game that aims to further enhance computer programming education by addressing occurring problems. This process, however, requires proper planning during the design of educational games, and thus the availability of adequate guidelines that include all characteristics that should be incorporated in such games. This paper aims to introduce and elaborate on a holistic framework that has been constructed as a guide towards the development of this game. To this end, we study existing frameworks that have been proposed for the design of educational games and document features currently supported by educational games that teach computer programming. We conclusively propose the framework we have constructed for the design of our game. This framework can be used for the design of other computer programming-specific educational games and extended for other educational domains.

In this paper we present enJine, an open-source didactic game engine, its architecture and some results of applying it as a support tool for teaching Computer Graphics in a computer engineering course. The evolution of the engine's requisites and architecture is discussed, as well as the plans for future development of the software.

Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 2014

The aim of this paper is to argue and demonstrate the use of a scriptable game-engine as a supportive technology for understanding and implementation in an active learning environment for computer science. It is argued that the use of an active learning environment as a suitable environment for computer science. As a case study, artificial intelligence is used as a representative subfield of computer science and implements an active learning environment with a scriptable game-engine for students. A demonstration is given of the use of a scriptable game-engine to teach intelligent agents using object-oriented programming concepts. The students were interviewed with general and specific open-ended questions in a written interview. Various Likert-type scale questions were also asked to rate their experience. Interpretive content analysis was used to understand their perceptions regarding the instructional design and their learning experience. Grounded in the students' and the authors' own learning experience, practical guidelines for the implementation of a scriptable game-engine as a supportive technology in any computer science classroom environment are provided.

日本大学生産工学部 第47回（平成26年度,2014）学術講演会, 2014

This paper evaluates the current development of GUI Game Engine and presents an overview of some of its application to merging game art design and programming, especially in the teaching field. The implementation of GUI Game Engine can help to transform the art creations into interactive multimedia design, and this is crucial and attractive to art designer and students. A number of game engines have come up that can be used to facilitate efficient Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and game development. By expanding the user types and market segmentation to non-programmer, GUI Game Engines achieve their business successes in game developer market. However, the application of GUI Game Engine is still lacking research work concerned with the connections among art design and game development.