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Three Approaches Towards Teaching Game Production

Tuomas Mäkilä, Harri Hakonen, Jouni Smed, Andy Best, Three Approaches Towards Teaching Game Production. In: Design and Use of Serious Games, Intelligent Systems, Control, and Automation: Science and Engineering, 3-18, Springer Netherlands, 2009.

Abstract:

Teaching game production benefits computer science and engineering
students, because game applications are usually complex interactive real-time systems, which are non-trivial to implement. Moreover, game production has a multi-disciplinary nature, because - in addition to software development - a game production process can include areas such as commercialization issues, game design, graphics design and implementation, sound engineering, level design, and story design. This kind of project environment teaches the development team to work and communicate efficiently. Having organized a variety of game production
project courses in the Department of Information Technology in the University of Turku the students have implemented complete computer games or game proto-types. Our focus has been on teaching game related algorithms, software technologies and software engineering aspects of game production. We have used three different teaching approaches to organize the courses: (1) the traditional home assignment model where the students take full responsibility of organizing the production, (2) research seminars where the teachers act as direct customers for the production, and (3) intensive courses where the teachers participate in the production as coaches and mentors. In this presentation, we describe the three different teaching approaches, present them as formal process models, and compare them to commercial game production processes. Additionally, we consider the multidisciplinary nature of game production and discuss how the issue can be taken into consideration in a study environment where the students are mainly technology
oriented.

BibTeX entry:

@INBOOK{cMaHaSmBe09a,
  title = {Three Approaches Towards Teaching Game Production},
  booktitle = {Design and Use of Serious Games},
  author = {Mäkilä, Tuomas and Hakonen, Harri and Smed, Jouni and Best, Andy},
  series = {	Intelligent Systems, Control, and Automation: Science and Engineering},
  publisher = {Springer Netherlands},
  pages = {3-18},
  year = {2009},
}

Belongs to TUCS Research Unit(s): Algorithmics and Computational Intelligence Group (ACI)

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