A game development Master's thesis: Facilitating the Education of Game Development
by The Acagamic
I recently finished writing my Master’s thesis (German Diplomarbeit) on “Facilitating the Education of Game Development”. It has taken me half a year to gather information from game industry sources (such as Bob Bates, Bruce Shelley, Jochen Hamma, or David A. Smith), academic papers and game development books to come up with a small guide for a video game prototyping tool for game education.
The thesis is available for download and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Germany License.
My thesis gives a classification of many game development tools used in academia for teaching game development to students. This classification is done by listing advantages and disadvantages of the tools. It also introduces different focus points in the education of game development.
I think game development holds such an incredible amount of benefits for classic education that it can not only improve the way we learn but also enrich the subject that we learn with vivid examples.
While I pursued an interesting approach during the thesis with trying to use a Smalltalk environment for the completion of a game prototyping tool, I was not convinced of that being the right choice. In the end, I can say that there will definitely be high-level programming approaches to game development, especially for academic prototyping. But I suspect that those will rather employ the C# language and gear more towards integration with DirectX or its successors.
In all cases, I hope the knowledge that I have compiled about using a high-level programming approach towards education of game development will prove useful for some educators out there.