Summer Course Revisions: CS215 Introduction to Game Design

I know what you're thinking. Planning for the Fall already? The trouble is that I was scheduled to teach the new capstone course for the Game Design & Development concentration in the CS department even though this semester will be the first time anyone can actually declare that concentration. We were given orders to try to get students graduating from the new concentrations as soon as possible. Unfortunately, advising didn't push students into this course, and it wasn't in the system when they picked their courses, so that course is critically underenrolled. On paper, I'm still scheduled to teach it, but it will almost certainly be cancelled.

This is relevant because that capstone course was supposed to be the locus for a community-engaged immersive learning project. We always had the back-up plan, though, which was to put that collaboration into the academic year structure I have been using, splitting the project across CS215 Introduction to Game Design and CS490 Software Production Studio. Given the enrollment in that capstone course, I went ahead and "finalized" the plans for an immersive game design class.

The good news is that this is how I have been teaching the course for a while now, and it has been successful overall. I modified the project schedule to include the exercises from Justin Gary's Think Like a Game Designer, which I wrote about earlier this summer (1, 2). I also had to modify the schedule to allow for some of the conference travel I have this semester. I put up the course site today, which has public plans for the first four weeks of the semester. I have the rest planned but have not yet formally published them, waiting until I have a chance to get to know these students a bit.

Because the enrollment in CS215 is a bit higher than I have had in the past, I have moved away from in-class poster presentations. I really like having students present posters, but it doesn't scale to over 15 or so students. I tinkered with the idea of breaking them up into an A and B group and alternating posters and conventional submissions, but this got too awkward. Instead, I'm asking them to put their work on Canvas discussion boards. My plan is to combine small group discussion with random (or intentional) selection of submissions for brief presentation. There are a lot of interesting things that come up during poster presentations, and I am hoping this will still allow those to emerge through the discussions.