My CS course did feature games, tough in a very beginning of this in my country (Brazil), so I took it almost in the end of the course, to be perfectly honest, if I would base the course I had on Game Programming to know if I would make this for a living or not, I would say it was a major deception. All that we had was more game theory than actuall programming, actually we had almost no programming, some scripts in some forgoten language that I can't even remember (think of something in the ideia of Klick And Play), it was good to know what are some of the steps involved in making a game (strangely enough, after 2 years I ended up programming some 2 or 3 small games as a profession), but for a CS course I found it very, very disapointing.
Later I found out that the final paper on the introduction to programming subject (where they teach C) was to actually make a text-based PacMan, and some other classic games (like Space Invaders for instance), this I think it makes way more sense then to start already with Game Theory if the ideia is actually to hold the student in the CS course, the University usually had a drop of around 50% in the first year, tough this is not official and based solely on my observations, I would say that after this the drop went to 25%, so it's definatly worth it.
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My CS course did feature games, tough in a very beginning of this in my country (Brazil), so I took it almost in the end of the course, to be perfectly honest, if I would base the course I had on Game Programming to know if I would make this for a living or not, I would say it was a major deception. All that we had was more game theory than actuall programming, actually we had almost no programming, some scripts in some forgoten language that I can't even remember (think of something in the ideia of Klick And Play), it was good to know what are some of the steps involved in making a game (strangely enough, after 2 years I ended up programming some 2 or 3 small games as a profession), but for a CS course I found it very, very disapointing. Later I found out that the final paper on the introduction to programming subject (where they teach C) was to actually make a text-based PacMan, and some other classic games (like Space Invaders for instance), this I think it makes way more sense then to start already with Game Theory if the ideia is actually to hold the student in the CS course, the University usually had a drop of around 50% in the first year, tough this is not official and based solely on my observations, I would say that after this the drop went to 25%, so it's definatly worth it.