I've written a few flash games and am currently a CS major. From my experience, writing games is really quite tedious and not nearly as rewarding as solving programming puzzles and such. Games that introductory-level students are capable of writing are generally rather boring and not as useful/practical about as sorting algorithms, data structures, etc...
Furthermore, having a class focused on gaming will probably attract more gaming-type people instead of problem-solving type people. The latter generally make better programmers.
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I've written a few flash games and am currently a CS major. From my experience, writing games is really quite tedious and not nearly as rewarding as solving programming puzzles and such. Games that introductory-level students are capable of writing are generally rather boring and not as useful/practical about as sorting algorithms, data structures, etc...
Furthermore, having a class focused on gaming will probably attract more gaming-type people instead of problem-solving type people. The latter generally make better programmers.