Notification: Today’s 3/18 seminar cancelled (move to 4/22 Midterm Week)
Monday (3/21) afternoon, Dept of CSIE arranges a special research talk, in substitue of 6/17 seminar.
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Dept of CSIE invites Prof. Kelvin Sung (Sung Xianqing) from University of Washington Bothell campus, to share his research results. Prof. Sung specializes in the development of Game-Based learning and video games.
Topic：Learnings from Building Videogames for Learning
Localtion: International Conference Hall, 4th floor of Science & Engineering Building II.
Time: 14:00~16:00
Language: English
Abstract:
In 2006, funded by Microsoft Research, we began to investigate approaches to harvest the energy and passion for videogames from the youth. Our goals were to engage them in learning the knowledge and majoring in the discipline that produced these games—Computer Science (CS). Our initial efforts focused on simple game-like assignments which challenged students in programming with relevant CS concepts. These results led to funding from the US National Science Foundation in supporting our attempts at building custom videogame application programming interfaces (API) designed for students to build casual videogames while learning specific programming concepts, e.g., conditional, repetitions, arrays. We have developed an elaborate series of tutorials to accompany each API, including instructional videos and sample videogames, to illustrate how to build fun and engaging games based on CS concepts (https://depts.washington.edu/cmmr/GTCS/). In parallel, our research group has been successful in securing funding to commercialize different versions of videogames build based on these APIs.
This talk begins with a brief survey of the current state of integrating videogames into typical CS courses; follows with the discussion of our journey from building simple game-like assignments to the custom APIs designed for students with no programming background; and eventually to our current commercialization initiatives. The talk will emphasized on our learnings along the way including pitfalls to avoid, best practices to follow when integrating videogame development into CS courses, and most importantly, learning opportunities for students during the process of producing commercial videogames.