From:                                                      Kelvin Sung [KSung@uwb.edu]

Sent:                                                        Monday, March 31, 2008 10:20 PM

To:                                                            John Nordlinger

Cc:                                                            Ivan Lumala; Kelvin Sung

Subject:                                                  RE: Award Number: 15871  - March 2008 Progress Report (XNA Based Games-Themed Programming Assignments)

 

(Sorry for the typo).

 

Re:       Award Number: 15871: Feb March 2008 Progress Report

(XNA Based Games-Themed Programming Assignments)

 

 

Presentations Given:

  1. GDCSE and SIGCSE conference paper presentations. Both of the papers’ presentations were well attended and were received. People seem genuinely interested in our results. Though, at this time of the year, most academics are deeply in classes and thus are probably too busy to investigate new teaching materials. I hope by late May or June time frame, more people will contact us about our results.
  2. Workshop presentations at GDCSE – this was a 2 hour version of what we were going to present at SIGCSE. Though the scheduling of the workshop was not perfect, we had good attendance (around 20+ peoples showed up and stayed to the end). The 20+ people filled out my survey forms. Feedback was excellent!
  3. SIGCSE pre-conference full day workshop. Mitch Walker introduced the workshop. His excellent presentation put the entire workshop in the proper context. As a direct result, the workshop went quite well. We had around 30+ participants and almost all stayed for the entire duration. I have not seen the survey feedback forms yet, but verbal feedbacks from the participants were very positive.
  4. BYU invited talk – Ivan helped connected me with BYU’s recruiting alum, and I was invited to present a workshop similar to that from the GDCSE. There were around 20-30 undergraduate students present, most stayed for the entire workshop. We programmed the block breaker games together. BYU students are very polite, very responsive, and very smart. We had a ball (and we programmed one)! It was fun.

 

Submitted work:

§   G. Orr, K. Sung, B. Wilson, and D. Wolff (Organizer/Moderator), "The Content And Role of The Computer Graphics Course in Small Liberal Arts Colleges," Submitted Panel Proposal to CCSC-NW 2008 Conference, March, 2008.

§   M. Panitz, and K. Sung, "Incrementally Incorporating Video Games Into Instruction Using XNA Game-Themed Assignments," Submitted Tutorial Proposal to CCSC-NW 2008 Conference, March, 2008.

 

On-going work:

§   Continue assessments of using the XNA Game-Themed Assignments in existing CS1/2 classes. Last quarter we have collected results from teaching the courses using only console assignments. This quarter we are teaching both CS1 and CS2 using the game-themed assignments. In all cases we are collecting assessment results. This information is very exciting! We believe SIGCSE audiences will be very interested in these results.

§   Introductory course programming course based on games: M. Panitz is teaching this course for the CSS program in Spring term. We have designed a careful assessment program to understand students’ background, interests, expectations, and eventually satisfactions. On the academic side, we have designed pre- and post- tests. We will definitely summarize the results from this class and write this up over the summer. This should be an interesting SIGCSE paper.

§   University of Washington Institute of Games for Learning: we are a full participant in the proposal process. We are fully engaged in the preparation for MSR campus visit.