Game Education Summit North America

In this session, Dr. Jinghua Zhan proposes a unique gaming concentration program to reenergize computer science education at Winston-Salem State University (WSSU), an HBCU. Nationally, many gaming concentration programs in the computer science (CS) curriculum have been successfully developed. Nevertheless, to our knowledge, none have been established at any of the HBCUs.

The gaming concentration in computing curriculum at WSSU aims to educate minority students with the skills necessary to participate as computer scientists in a video game development team and other software development projects. This concentration will help to reenergize the CS program, attract new minority students to pursuea  CS major, and eventually help the enrollment and retention of under-represented students and increase the quality of graduates in this field. The successful gaming concentration at WSSU will help advance the knowledge in developing curricula for HBCUs and other minority institutions.

Our gaming concentration program includes three components: Practical Learning, Education and Assessment. The Practical Learning component includes guest speaker and field trip series as well as an annual student showcase. The Education component involves designing three game development courses and building a cutting-edge game studio to enhance student learning. Freshmen and sophomore students will be introduced to game development using high-level game engines. Junior and senior students will learn game development using XNA game studio and C#. Students will also learn how to develop games on multiple platforms including PCs, game consoles, and portable devices. All the game development courses will be offered in the new game studio instead of a traditional classroom. The Assessment component includes incorporating suggestions from the Advisory Board and developing evaluation plans. The Advisory Board, which consists of faculty from other universities and professionals from the game industry, will assist in curriculum development and the evaluation process. Faculty and students will be involved in the evaluation process as well.

The first Game Programming course was developed and offered in Spring 2010. We have rarely seen that level of passion and engagement from students. According to the course exit survey, 83% students wanted to take a continuing game development course to advance their skills and 100% students indicated their programming skills were significantly improved. This paper presents how we are going to enhance the existing course and build a unique gaming concentration program in the computing curriculum at WSSU.