Using Serious Games to Teach Game Design and Expand Service Learning Opportunities
Dep-Wah Davis
Professor, Computer Information Technology, Tomball College
Clark Friesen
Service Learning Coordinator, Tomball College
Abstract
Creating assignments that allow students to develop their art, modeling, programming, or audio skills, while daunting, is the easiest part of developing courses for game development. The difficult part is helping students develop the soft skills they need: communication, time management, proper documentation, and working in teams. Through the utilization of a service learning project in a capstone course, students were able to develop all these skills and more. Through the process of developing a project for the community, students not only found their technical knowledge challenged, but they also found ways to conquer the development of soft skill through the process of having milestone dates in which the students needed to describe what they were doing to community partners who were not familiar with game design. This session will summarize the projects and the process involved with the development of serious games for service learning.