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Computer Games and Traditional CS Courses

Posted by Soulskill on from the terrible-terrible-games dept.

drroman22 writes "Schools are working to put real-world relevance into computer science education by integrating video game development into traditional CS courses. Quoting: 'Many CS educators recognized and took advantage of younger generations' familiarity and interests for computer video games and integrate related contents into their introductory programming courses. Because these are the first courses students encounter, they build excitement and enthusiasm for our discipline. ... Much of this work reported resounding successes with drastically increased enrollments and student successes. Based on these results, it is well recognized that integrating computer gaming into CS1 and CS2 (CS1/2) courses, the first programming courses students encounter, is a promising strategy for recruiting and retaining potential students." While a focus on games may help stir interest, it seems as though game development studios are as yet unimpressed by most game-related college courses. To those who have taken such courses or considered hiring those who have: what has your experience been?

4 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. I program games. by clinko · · Score: 5, Informative

    I program games. I'm coding right now in fact.

    In less than 6 hours, I will be going to the office to program insurance software.

    If you want to program games, do it for fun.

    If you want to eat, bone up on your Insert/Update/Select/Deletes.

  2. One step at a time by skander · · Score: 5, Insightful

    While games are obviously the result of lots of code, there is very little that a 1st year college student could learn about how to program Grand Theft Auto in 2 or 3 courses... Pong might be a good start...

    Modern day games use loads of very high end CS concepts, that are simply out of reach for novices. While getting people motivated for a discipline is the first step to teaching them, this tactic sounds more like advertising than actual teaching.

    Growing a problem solving mind by the use of strict logic, and taking things one step at a time is the way to become a great programmer. Setting out to recreate the Crytek engine on your first day is bound to end in failure, and more important, disappointement.

    1. Re:One step at a time by muecksteiner · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yep, it's all about advertisement. With that one word you've hit the nail on the head. Utility to the students... comes somewhere way down on the list of desirable properties of these courses. In a lot of cases, the main reason is so that the one graphics lecturer who is into gaming himself gets some visibility. Remember, the fight for resources at a university is usually beyond feral - and visibility, and the number of students, go a long way in securing them. What you later do with these students, or how good their career prospects are... well, that is very seldom evaluated. To a disturbing degree, working academia is very often about appearances, and little else.

      I work as an academic in Computer Graphics, so I sort of know what I'm talking about here... and frankly, there are too many people in this area already who "are into" game developing. Far too many.

      Now this is not to say that a) one cannot have a well-paying career in game development, or that b) game programming is technically uninteresting. Nothing could be further from the truth (especially point b). But there is such a thing as catering for the needs of an industry - and then there is also mindless overproduction of graduates with questionable qualifications, just in order to please those academics who have "gaming" on their resumes. And I know of at least on example who actually does "gaming" precisely because it is such a good way of getting students into his working group. And not because he is all that interested in the area as such.

      Just look, for instance, at the academic job listings on jobs.ac.uk in the past 24 months. There are lots of small universities starting to offer "game development courses", and are recruiting lecturers for this. In my opinion, there are simply not enough jobs in this line of work to actually offer such a large number of graduates of such a specialised course any sort of perspective, once they graduate. And besides - what do these courses usually teach? And who gets recruited by these smaller universities? Former top-notch developers who can really communicate useful stuff to the students? Or rather guys who did not make the cut at a major studio, and are fed up with freelancing?

      At the last Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (one of the smaller, but quite high-quality geek-outs for the rendering community), there was a panel discussion which included a somewhat senior person from the gaming industry. His assessment of the relevance of current real time graphics research was pretty short: guys, it's nice what you are doing at the universities, but most of this is almost totally useless for us in the real world, who have to meet deadlines, and make code work on normal systems.

      But what is taught in those "gaming courses"? Usually precisely the stuff the main lecturer gets off on, and that he wrote papers about (and that the guy from the gaming studio described as nice but useless). This is natural, of course, everyone does that thing of teaching about one's research achievements (myself included, in my area), but... if there is one area in Computer Graphics that should be taught by people with industry experience, it is gaming. And this is practically never the case.

      Just my 0.2E-32$

      A.

  3. Not This Again... by Comatose51 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Schools are working to put real-world relevance into computer science education by integrating video game development into traditional CS courses."

    Nowhere in the article do I find a statement that supports the claim that traditional CS courses are lacking real-world relevance. Can we please stop taking shots at the four years CS degree? If you don't like it, then don't get it. It's only been five years since I graduated my with my Bachelor's in CS and I can tell you that the course I took are highly relevant. I use it every day when I'm coding and thinking about my algorithms. I need to know what the run-time complexity of my methods and how I can use various data structures to make my code more efficient and what the trade offs are. In fact I do it so much that it's almost second nature. These are things they teach you in the core CS classes, at least where I studied that's what happened. My school was very prestigious but not well known for its CS department so I imagine that my education isn't that extraordinary.

    Our CS program offered a set of courses that would have allowed students to create games. In fact, that's what the computer graphics course did. I worked with a couple of students who took that class. They reused those same skills again later during our AI project when we created a simulation where the AI played against itself. We weren't exactly creating the next WarCraft III or Civilization IV but some of the fundamentals are there. Likewise, those same skills could be put to use in other projects. The school doesn't have to have a course called "Game Programming for the Real World" for people to see that its course are relevant to the various sub fields in software engineering.

    Also, software engineering is a more expansive field than just making games. Programming an O/S or network programming are both very relevant skills even today.

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