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Broadening participation through scalable game design

Published: 12 March 2008 Publication History

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.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGCSE '08: Proceedings of the 39th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
March 2008
606 pages
ISBN:9781595937995
DOI:10.1145/1352135
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 12 March 2008

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  1. flow
  2. game design
  3. rapid prototyping

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