We are designing a 'game theory and design' humanities course for engineers. In many cases, they are game-loving, game-playing students who want to design computer games. They frequently are already designing games. What lack is an understanding of game design formalism. This type of learning can be acquired by trial and error, or jump-started with a good course. But what makes a course good?

When making a course, there are many styles.

The basic components of a course include:

1. lecture slides
2. lecture speaking
3. lecture blackboard use
4. textbook(s)
5. homework solving
6. quizzes & tests
7. labs

Under the concept of differentiated learning, different students have different learning styles. Some learn best from books, others from lectures. Some learn from derivations and concepts, others by problem solving and examples. Some do well on detailed problems or homework but poorly at quizzes and concept problems; for others it's vis versa.

Next we have to look at what we're teaching. The material components that must be conveyed include:

1. facts
2. concepts
3. derivation of concepts or history of origins of concepts
4. linking of concepts
5. examples
6. problem solving

Point one, some textbooks provide pre-made PowerPoints and you can walk through the book. Other courses use no textbooks. Some use multiple textbooks. So we have to choose our source for the material.

Point two, a course can be linear, building on material (like Physics 261 aka Kinematics). Or, it can be a survey course that covers several unconnected topics (like Physics 261 aka "Waves, then Fields, then Thermodynamics, then Induction"). These obviously require different structuring of the course as well.

Structuring your Course

A good syllabus provides an outline of how the course proceeds and how each scorable item is weighed, which helps in providing the students with an attack plan. But before we can create that, we need to decide ourselves what the course is about.

My own style is to come up with a centerpiece book reference for the course, so that students who prefer book learning to verbal have a core resource they can use. At the same time, the lectures should provide more than just the book (otherwise, why bother having them).

Since some students do poorly with book learning, the lectures also should be sufficient for a student to pass the course without cracking open the book at all (although I'm happy to assume a 'C' if they don't use the book).

I see the role of lecture as framing then introducing the material and providing context for the facts and other material. Also, in helping students link core concepts through examples. The role of homework is to give the student practice in solving complex problems; the role of quizzes is practice in being able to quickly solve simpler problems as well as reinforce core concepts.

In an ideal world, there is learning both in homeworks and quizzes, and as such, providing answers after the fact is necessary, ideally rapidly after the work is turned in so (at least some) students will get a chance to see where their mistakes were. If a given HW or quiz problem has a large number of students botch it, that is a indicate for the teacher to cover that material again (or further) in class, since learning did not occur.

Our Game Course

Given all these pieces and styles, that is one reason I spending time coming up with a centerpiece textbook. Once we have that -- and Wendy Despain's newly released '100 Principles of Game Design' is, I think that book-- we can decide how to string together the topics. That book is not useful to walk through in a linear fashion.

I see this course as being very 'lab like', in that there should be a lot of 'design a game' in-class and homework exercises. Part of this is that game design (like writing) is learned by designing games as much as looking at other designs. Part is that it provides a way for students to experience both good and bad games and develop an ability to critique games. Finally, game design is as much art as psychological science, so hands-on designing is essential in mastering the art of it.

So I think we should use '100 Designs' to introduce historical, psychological, and other core pieces of formal game design theory. At 30 lectures to cover 100 items, that means we decide on a flow to do 3 related concepts per class as our baseline frame. The book is not in a strong thematic order, so we'll skip around a lot, ergo mapping the book to a curriculum sequence is necessary.

We can bring in outside articles and references to fill in gaps that the book covers poorly. Potentially we can also use 'Theory of Fun' as a secondary text. Then, we decide which in-class exercises and which quizzes will work to reinforce the material. We also add in some of Jesse's "lenses" to provide some of the intangible 'art of design' discussion for in-class spicing up, often as a closing bit.

Implementation

One possible weekly schedule is:

1. Class 1: evaluate HWs, then 3 Design concepts
2. Class 2: 3 Design concepts, assign a game design HW, then discuss a Lens

Under this schema, we should group '100 Design' pages into what we'd like to cover. Earlier I had topic areas: History of Games, Psychology behind games, Types of Games, etc (and I'm too lazy to look it up right now...) So we could map that out as a start.

But since I'm rushing from theory to implementation, I'll shut up on this for now. One key thing is to make a course we would enjoy taking and that we think has a good flow. If it doesn't make sense to us, there's no way we can effectively convey it to the students.

Until next month,
Sandy
(sandy at rpg.net)