Following up on my previous post, here is another short reflection on one of the courses I regularly teach: Game Programming, also known as CS315. My students are taking the final exam right now, so it seems a good time to record some of my own thoughts about the class.
I did not make any major changes to this class, and it continues to be one of my favorite classes to teach. Godot Engine is just the right level of abstraction for junior-level CS students who are just getting into game development: they can make things reasonably good-looking and fast while still getting into some serious details of game programming. Checklist-based evaluation means that the work is fairly easy to grade and the students by and large understand what is expected of them. Yes, there are always some hiccups here, but there's not enough to warrant radical change.
The class involves several sessions where I am demonstrating concepts and students are thinking about how the pieces fit together. They did a good job with that this year, and they asked better questions than I remember past students asking. Of course, some of the questions could just be answered with, "Try it and let us know," but still, I didn't want to prevent their asking questions. The flip side of this, however, is that they were terrible at taking notes. The fallacy that they will remember lectures is strong with them. I am not sure how I can use the class to help fight against this ridiculous misconception that plagues so many students.
There were a few sessions that I expected to finish in one class period that ended up taking more than two. For example, I put together an interactive lesson on shaders, and for some reason, it filled up a lot more time than I expected. I'm simply noting this here so that I can keep that in mind for the future.
There are some bolts yet to be tightened on the course. The final project has too many checklist items that are easy to cheese. For example, given an item like "Add pop to your UI using AnimationPlayer," some students do a lame fly-in and call it done. I am not quite sure how to invert this. That is, what I want is for them to do something they are motivated to do, and I give it course credit. One of the downsides of checklist-based grading is that some will do the minimum required and present this as if it demonstrates mastery. It's not obvious to me where the dividing line is between those two, especially in the absence of a game design prerequisite. That is, for this course, they can want to make something pretty dumb, and it's hard to distinguish then between whether what they wanted was dumb or whether they were bad at making something better.
I look forward to continuing to teach this course as a generation of students comes up through the Game Design & Development concentration. I am hopeful that we are bringing students who are even more excited to excel at these ideas rather than just barely pass the bar. I expect I will continue to use Godot Engine, and I am hopeful that next year, it will be Godot 4. Indeed, right now I am evaluating whether I want to build a prototype in Flutter or in Godot, and a large part of it is because Dart is just such a nicer language to express ideas than GDScript 1.0.
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