[game_edu] they call them languages for a reason

[Bertozzi, Elena G]

I have spent most of my teaching career teaching humanities students how to program. I think that coding is essential for those who want to build interactive media because understanding how programming works is a kind of grammar for being able to communicate in a science-based environment. Unfortunately many students come up through our school systems without learning rigorous thinking: that they have to be able to establish one thing before they can build a framework on top of it. Programming forces you to go step by step through a process so that you can understand the mechanisms through which it works. Debugging code, in particular, is an incredibly tedious process that demands this kind of attention and thinking through actions to their conclusions.

Training the brain this way makes for stronger designers regardless of what they actually end up doing. In game design, everyone on the team needs to understand how difficult it will be to accomplish particular goals because they can appreciate the complexity of the code required to make it work.

I think all children should learn more than one language growing up for similar reasons.


Elena Bertozzi, PhD. Associate Professor
     Media Arts & Game Development
          University of Wisconsin at Whitewater
               McGraw 104 - tel. 262.472.1725
                    bertozze at uww.edu   www.ardeaarts.org   uww.edu/games   playexpo.org