Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Many information technology educators have worked in recent years to develop courses to attract students to the field. As faculty achieve success with technical courses designed to be appeal to a broad audience, it can be hard to maintain the initial excitement particularly as multiple sections of the courses are taught on a continuing basis. In this article we describe a project that added peer evaluation to an assessment in a game design course with a large non-major audience. While controversial, peer evaluation has shown some promise in motivating students to work harder and in improving certain key skills. Consistent …

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 …