1. A Recipe for Game Development Assignments in CS2 Jude Allred Advised by Professor Michael Main and Professor Clayton Lewis Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado, Boulder Jude.Allred@colorado.edu Jude.FogBugz.com

2. Spoiler I surveyed CS education research, and there are many promising frontiers. There are interested choices to make in designing a CS class. There is a strong case for using game development as the basis for assignments in CS2.

3. The Recipe Incorporate these items into your CS2 Assignments by using games: Doing so should provide increase student comprehension of the course material, lowered peer intimidation, performance improvements for the low-end students, and increased comfort with and enthusiasm for computer science.

4. Use Games

5. Familiarity

6. Embedded Learning

7. Fun

8. Assets

9. Deployability

10. Playable on Startup

11. Concretize Abstract Concepts

12. Extensibility

13. Mitigate Extraneous Code

14. These steps are simple And you can incorporate at least some of them into any assignment. And you probably already are.

15. Use The Recipe Incorporate these items into your CS2 Assignments by using games: Doing so should provide increase student comprehension of the course material, lowered peer intimidation, performance improvements for the low-end students, and increased comfort with and enthusiasm for computer science.

16. General Difficulties in CS Computer science education suffers from Dropping enrollment Poor gender diversity Inconsistencies in teaching methodologies

17. Background Topics CS1 & CS2 Language Choice Comfort, Intimidation, and Interest

18. CS1 & CS2 In particular CS1 and CS2 experience severe dropout rates Primary focus of CS education research Defined by the 2001 Computing Curricula Final Report

19. CS1 & CS2 Strategies ACM: Imperative-first Objects-first Functional-first Breadth-first Algorithms-first Hardware-first

21. Components-first

23. Objects-first Emphasize OO and design immediately Motivate control structures and programming as secondary topics motivated by OO Promising results, especially using Python Easy to get wrong

24. Components-first Focus on APIs and infrastructures in common use by software engineers Extremely practical Two implementations of components-first were surveyed by Howe et. al. in 2004 Concluded “viable” and best-suited as an advancement upon existing Objects-first classes.

25. Games-first Refocus course content on game development without altering learning objectives Follows the mentality that Imperative-first vs. Objects-first is minor compared to course content. Continuing focus of iteration and advancement; results are promising.

27. Secondary Programming Language

29. Comfort, Intimidation, and Interest

30. Methods of reducing intimidation

31. The Recipe Incorporate these items into your CS2 Assignments by using games: Game development is a maturing experiment in CS1 and is ready for active experimentation in CS2. The components I prescribe have been shown benefits in CS1; I expect their benefits to generalize to CS2

32. Others are working on it Lewis and Massingill’s Framework Sung and Panitz’s Modules Leutenegger’s continued iterations

33. …And there are many tools I can personally recommend:

34. Next Step Controlled experiments on the results of implementing components of this recipe in CS2

35. Thanks! More details, data, and citations are provided in my Thesis document, available at: http://jude.fogbugz.com Please share your feedback with me, especially if you try any of this: Jude.Allred@Colorado.edu