Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

As a part of an NSF-funded project to enhance computational thinking in undergraduate general education courses, activities and assessments were developed for a game design course taught at DePaul University. The focus of the course is on game analysis and design, but the course textbook uses an approach that is heavily grounded in computational thinking principles. We describe the course activities and assignments and discuss an initial assessment of those materials. Our results show that there is a gap in difficulty between several of the activities and indicate that the materials developed help students to better learn the computational thinking …

Computing offers essential problem-solving tools needed for contemporary challenges. The role of computing in education, and appropriate pathways for modern students, are of concern [10]. Educators recognize the importance of improving information technology (IT) skills and fluency, and studies have developed guidelines [7][8], but the analytical concepts and tools of computing have benefits beyond IT fluency. CT [12] continues earlier discussions on the nature of computing, [3][9]. This has helped the computing community to strengthen definition of the problem solving skills that computing brings to society, through education, outreach, and research. Recently, CT has served as a basis for several …