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2024 Autumn · CS Education and Games

  • Icebreaker: "I am a TA for course XX; a game I like is..." (electronic games, board games, children's games/toys). From the games TAs like, discuss how game mechanics combine with courses (bridge-builder/structural mechanics, Minecraft redstone, Genshin hidden-score, Hearthstone recursive cards reflecting CS concepts, Minesweeper/Sudoku, presenting algorithms with Snake, etc.).
  • Demo RoboBUG (a serious game teaching the correct debugging mindset through a "debugging game", open-sourced by the author), and an algorithm case using the Snake game.
  • Brainstorm: introducing educational games/gamification; combining Black Myth: Wukong with CS courses; is game design/development worth being a CS elective; do "GPA ranking" and "relative-performance grading" count as gamification, and why don't they feel "fun"; group peer-review / one-on-one battle / LLM-arena-like competition (not grading others' assignments but comparing relative merits).

Cases and materials

These cases can be grouped into "learning CS by playing games" and "learning CS by making games."

  • Learning by playing:
  • Perfect Snake: Exploring Algorithms Through the Snake Game — how to design a Snake algorithm that eats the whole board, involving A*, Hamiltonian cycles, Q-learning, etc.
  • CONTENTR: An Experiential Game for Teaching Value Tradeoffs in Social Media Governance.
  • Parallel Islands: A Parallel Computing Educational Video Game (SIGCSE 2024).
  • RoboBUG: A Serious Game for Learning Debugging Techniques (ICER 17).
  • A Game-Based Approach for Teaching Algorithms and Data Structures using Visualizations.
  • Games with an algorithmic/CS background: Turing Complete, PC Building Simulator; intelligent-agent competitions (Saiblo, Gomoku); the algorithm-competition version of "Xiaoyuan Kousuan" (CPDuels).
  • Learning by making: Software Institute intro-programming "write a game!", etc.
  • Stereotyped "gamification designs": leaderboards, achievement/badge systems, quest systems; related experience reports such as How (not) to introduce badges to online exercises and An experience report on using gamification in technical higher education (gamification of computer-organization and cloud-computing courses); game-first intro programming A games first approach to teaching introductory programming, Computer games as motivation for design patterns, Puzzles and games, The art and science of game programming.

As the sharer noted: materials are plentiful; the question is how to choose the highest-quality ones to structure the discussion.

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