International Case Blasts  Perspectives on teaching games-related subjects presented in handy bite-sized chunks  Speakers have 5 minutes to introduce themselves and present their cases  Q&A for the speakers at the end (IF we have time left)  Take-Away: an overview of different approaches to games education

Your Moderator:  Dan Hodgson  Northumbria University in Newcastle, UK  BSc Computer Games Software Engineering (  Head of “Student Outreach” for IGDA ED SIG

Case 1: Rob Miles  Lecturer in Computer Science – University of Hull   Module manager for First Year C# programming course at Hull

Teaching Programming  Learning to program is hard  Teaching programming is hard  Need to motivate and enthuse

Teaching with Games  Games are great for teaching  Students are strongly motivated to write them  They also provide a good context for programming examples

What we are doing at Hull  Make a text based game in semester 1  Simple snake game  Move that onto a console in semester 2  2D "Snake on a Plane"  Start a games programming club for advanced students

How it works  The C# model for XNA is very easy to use  Students are encouraged to factor their text apps to make it easy to map onto the XNA framework

Results so far  Students like it  Even the ones not on the Games Programming Courses  We can teach some nice theory  From algorithms to events to OO design  Marking assignments is much more fun!  Get the student to let us play their game....

Find Out More  Presentations and sample code (and dodgy blog)