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Researchers Make a Case For Learning Through Video Game Creation
ub3r n3u7r4l1st sends along this snippet from Science Daily:
"Computer games have a broad appeal that transcends gender, culture, age and socio-economic status. Now, computer scientists in the US think that creating computer games, rather than just playing them, could boost students' critical and creative thinking skills as well as broaden their participation in computing. ... 'Worldwide, there is increasing recognition of a digital divide, a troubling gap between groups that use information and communication technologies widely and those that do not,' the team explains. 'The digital divide refers not only to unequal access to computing resources between groups of people but also to inequalities in their ability to use information technology fully.' There are many causes and proposed solutions to bridging this divide, but applying them at the educational and computer literacy level in an entertaining and productive way might be one of the more successful. The team adds that teaching people how to use off-the-shelf tools to quickly build a computer game might allow anyone to learn new thinking and computing skills."
I suppose you're correct if you look at it as teaching kids how to program video games, but it looks like they're trying to get them to learn critical and creative thinking in a broad range, rather than xor'ing pixels all day.
If you compare it to art class, where students liberally steal ideas and style from Van Gogh and Matisse (and Bob Ross) yet still learn the basics of how to paint, I think that in the same way students will be able to pick up some basics of the thought processes involved in designing something from scratch, in a variety of disciplines. Even with off-the-shelf software, they will still have to think on the surface of how to render out an environment, build characters or puzzles, and create some sort of user interface and menu system. It'll likely be slapped together and a horrible program, but it could definitely build computer skills for those with a penchant for problem-solving and creative thinking.
I think it's a good idea overall, but the implementation will probably completely fail in the US due to lack of capable teachers.
Grammar Lesson: you're is a contraction of "you are"; your means you possess something; yore means days gone by.
Indeed. Modding is great. I learned loads from UT modding. It makes understanding OOP much easier as when you start you can relate 'objects' to ingame stuff that you can see, while later you find out that there are many 'objects' that you cannot see at all. It gives a base for AI, it teaches programming of course, it learns you about debugging and performance.
You don't have to create the next countersstrike or whatever, just make something fun. And it will teach you a lot more then sitting in a classroom.