Developing Programming Assignments on the XBOX 360 Console

SIGCSE Pre-Conference Workshop
March 12, 2008

Kelvin Sung
Computing and Software Systems
University of Washington, Bothell
ksung@u.washington.edu

Download:  This zip-compressed file contains all of the documents referenced by this index file (including this file).

  1. Morning: Section-1: Introduction and Overview.
    1. Introduction: slides on background and overview.  
    2. Simple Example: construct and analyze the source code of a bare bone XNA project.
    3. Drawing with XNA: extend the simple example to support drawing of a triangle.
    4. Interactive control: Interactively control the location of the triangle.
    5. Running on the XBOX 360 console: run the interactive control project on the XBOX 360 console.

  2. Morning: Section-2: Introduction to and working with the XnaAssignmentBase library.
    1. XnaAssignmentBase Library: documentation and tutorial on the library. This library is especially designed to support faculty with no graphics and/or games background to experiment with games/graphics based assignments.
    2. Working with the Library: drawing and controlling a circle with the library.
    3. Working with media: including file texture and audio effects.

  3. Afternoon: Section-3: Building a BlockBreaker game from scratch with the XnaAssignmentBase library.
    1. Simple circle again: drawing and controlling the simple circle.
    2. The Ball Class: Extend the above application to shoot a bouncing ball.
    3. The Block and Paddle Classes: Now, include a paddle to bounce to bounce the ball around.
    4. The SetOfBlock Class: Viola! We have simple block breaker game!
    5. BlockBreaker with textures: Include a some file textures to make the game slightly more interesting.
    6. BlockBreaker with audio effects: Include audio effects to make the game (I hope) whole lot more interesting.
    7. Our last version: Here is the Link to our last version of the blockbreak game. Be sure to try Buttons A and B. The only differences is this version supports multiple balls going at the same time, and you can pause the game (with Start-Button or W-Key). Here is the source code to this game.

  4. Afternoon: Section-4: Examine sample assignments and wrap up. Here are the 7 game-themed assignment modules you can use in your CS1/2 courses. (Release 0.99, Release Date: Feb 25, 2008).
References:
What do you think?: If you have read this far! Thank you so very  much. We'd appreciate it very much if you can take another minute or two and fill out this feedback form (this is a word document) and send it to ksung@u.washington.edu. We sincerely appreciate your interests.
This document and the related materials are developed with support from Microsoft Research Computer Gaming Initiative under the Computer Gaming Curriculum in Computer Science RFP, Award Number 15871.