Release Guide

• The Examples: Here are all the XGC1 examples organized into topic areas (conditional, loops, functions, etc.) with mapping to the following target textbooks .
  • Audience: These examples are designed for faculty members to use in their existing CS1 classes.
  • Assumption on Experience: Faculty members do not need to have any existing knowledge in computer games and/or graphics. All examples are implemented based on a very simply graphics library ( XNACS1Lib , please refer to the following for the details of this library) with an accompanied detailed tutorial explaining the implementation of each example.
  • Approach to using these materials: we foresee faculty members teaching their existing CS1 classes "as is", and when additional (and hopefully more exciting) examples are necessary she can choose to use one of the XGC1 examples.


• The Library Support : As mentioned, all XGC1 examples are implemented based on the XNACS1Lib library. The XNACS1Lib is an extremely simple library designed to support knowledgeable programmers with no knowledge in games/graphics to design/implement interactive graphical applications. Here are detailed documentation and guides to working with this library.
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• Related Work: The XNA Game-Themed Assignments ( XGA ) are game-themed programming assignments that are designed such that they can be be transparently replaced in existing CS1/2 courses.

Programming Logic and Design , by Tony Gaddis (2008 Addison-Wesley)

Because Microsoft XNA supports C# programming language, we have also mapped our examples to:

• C# How To Program, Deitel et. al. (2002 Prentice Hall)
• C# For Programmers 2nd Edition , Deitel and Deitel (2005 Prentice Hall)

REFERENCES:

1. The art work used in XNA assignments are from the following sites:
   1. http://www.mccannas.com/free/freeart.htm
   2. http://www.ausmall.com.au/freegraf/freegrfa.htm
   3. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/clipart/FX101321031033.aspx?pid=CL100570201033


2. Many of the online art work are stored in (transparent) gif format. XNACS1Lib does not understand gif format. We use the Exorcist program to convert gif to png for textures. The Exorcist program can be downloaded from:
   1. http://www.nigels.com/exorcist/Download.html


3. Sound effect and background music files:
   1. http://www.a1freesoundeffects.com/
   2. http://www.pdmusic.org/


4. Free software used for format conversion:
   1. Switch Sound File Converted: http://www.nch.com.au/switch/ .

	This work is supported in part by a grant from Microsoft Research under the Computer Gaming Curriculum in Computer Science RFP, Award Number 15871 and 16531.
2/8/2010