[game_edu] Brenda Braithwaite's game_edu rant at GDC

[Bill Crosbie]

 Maybe the solution is to push this requirement down to the grade-school
level, and start tightening admissions requirements accordingly. That
doesn't solve the problem so much as it passes the buck to someone else,
admittedly.


>

> Has anyone else out there found a way around this when teaching

> programming, some method or resource that lets students get past the

> stuck-points of learning core programming concepts on their own without

> needing a human mentor to walk them through? If so, how did you do it?

>

>

>

I was just on the technical competency committee for New Jersey and we were
discussing this topic apart from game design. It looks like there are
efforts under way in NJ (would like to learn about other states) to move
these levels of competency in to areas as low as elementary and middle
school.

I do know that over the past four years of instruction that students who
came in to the program already able to program were able to apply that
knowledge effectively to design. Students that were trying to learn how to
program were so focused on having to think in a structured manner that it
was a greater challenge to do something innovative with game play.

I think the challenge with my program (I am housed in Comp Sci.) is that
there is a desire to move to structured engineering practices before the
benefit of these highly structured forms is evident.

Again, working with tech artists last week I was encouraged by how much
practical work in the industry they are able to accomplish as relative
programming novices. The spot a need, code to the best of their ability and
get the job done. The TA bootcamp had sessions on how to use a debugger and
the benefits of approaching python from an object oriented perspective. So
now that they have tools that are in production, they want to make them more
robust, but they didn't start with a theory of why robustness is important.
They grew in to that understanding.

So my challenge to my CS brethren - how willing are we to throw out the
notion of early OOP coding in this field to allow for the "let's build
something" ethic and then to be attentive enough to introduce engineering
principles once the students are looking for a better way to get things
done? [afraid I'll be run out of the ACM for these statements...]
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