Develop Game-Themed Examples for CS1/2 Without Background in Graphics or Games(SIGCSE 2010 Workshop)

Develop Game-Themed Examples for CS1/2
Without Background in Graphics or Games

Kelvin Sung
Computing and Software Systems
University of Washington, Bothell
ksung@u.washington.edu

Michael Panitz
Software Programming
Cascadia Community College
mpanitz@cascadia.edu

SIGCSE 2010 Workshop
March 2010

Abstract of the Workshop: The recent development and success of computer gaming classes and gaming-themed curricula are exciting and have demonstrated interesting potential. However, for faculty members with no computer gaming or graphics background the prospect of adopting or developing games-related courseware materials may seem daunting. This workshop is designed specifically for these faculty members. Based on the Microsoft XNA framework, we have developed an extremely simple game engine with 3 predefined classes and a handful of utility functions. Simple and effective game-themed courseware materials have been developed based on this simple game engine. For example, a Pong game like framework suitable for teaching conditional statements can be constructed in less than 30-lines of C# code. This workshop will present our simple game engine and guide participants in developing a complete Pong (or Block-Breaker) game. The workshop will also present examples of existing game-themed instructional modules and assignments.

Here is the compressed zip file to all the notes of this workshop.

Workshop Schedule:

Section-1: 7:00 - 7:10 Overview and Introduction.
1. Introduction: slides on background and overview.
2. Simple Example: construct and analyze the source code of a bare bone XNA project.
3. Drawing with XNA: draw a simple image with XNA^*.
4. Interactive control: interactively control the location of the image^*.
Section-2: 7:15 - 7:25 Work with the XNACS1Lib library.
1. Working with the Library: draw and control a circle with the library.
2. Working with media: include file texture and audio effects.
3. XNACS1Lib Library: tutorial on the library. This library is especially designed to support faculty with no graphics and/or games background to experiment with games/graphics based assignments.
Section-3: 7:30 - 8:30. Build a BlockBreaker game from scratch.
1. BolckBreaker: Design and implementation strategy.
2. Simple circle again: Coordinate system and simple circle.
3. The Ball Class: extend to shoot a bouncing ball.
4. The Block and Paddle Classes: include a paddle to bounce the ball around.
5. The BlockSet Class: Viola! We have a simple block breaker game!
6. BlockBreaker with textures: include a some file textures to make the game slightly more interesting.
7. BlockBreaker with audio effects: include audio effects to make the game (I hope) whole lot more interesting.

Break: 8:30 - 8:40
Section-4: 8:40 - 9:20. Survey of sample game-themed materials with XNACS1Lib.
Section-5: 9:25 - 9:40. Design and build your own game-themed materials. Here is a guide to design your own game, and here is a guide to implementation with XNACS1Lib.
Feedback: for us, and for SIGCSE (http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/SIGCSE2010Workshops:Workshop 7

Acknowledgement: ^*Thanks to Mitch Walker for the excellent idea of using sprite to introduce basic drawing with XNA.

This document and the related materials are developed with support from Microsoft Research Computer Gaming Initiative under the Computer Gaming Curriculum in Computer Science RFP, Award Number 15871, and 16531.