Using Game Projects in Intermediate Business Programming Classes
Brian Dobing, David Erbach
This paper proposes that some games can make excellent projects for intermediate business programming courses. They fit well with established educational criteria for project design and should motivate students to spend more time building them. Some projects that should work well include board games (e.g., Monopoly'") and learning games (e.g., Math Blaster'"), Gameprojects draw on the student's experience, provide room for creativity (particularly in the user interface) and scalability, and can include complex algorithms, file input/output and other desired elements. Games can also accommodate simple animation, sound, and other special effects. This study compared 25 game and 22 business projects written by business students in an intermediate Visual Basic programming course. The game projects were almost twice as large and more than twice as complex as the business projects, using common software metrics. This suggests that students are spending more time writing game projects and presumably learning more.
Brian Dobing is an assistant professor in information systems at the University of Lethbridge in Canada. He received his MBA and MSc in computational science from the University of Saskatchewan and his PhD from the University of Minnesota. Dr. Dobing's research focuses on issues in user analyst relationships and object-oriented analysis. He has articles published or in press in the Journal of Database Management, Internet Research, and Journal of Computing Information Systems.
David Erbach is professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science at Purdue-Fort Wayne. He received his PhD from Carubridge University in 1977. Since then, Dr. Erbach has held IS management positions in the private sector, as well as academic appointments at Washington State, the Uuiversity of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Winnipeg.
He has been known to spend time Onboth the theory and practise of garues, from go to Civilization. Dr. Erbach has served as a director of the International Go Federation, and tournament director of the North American Computer Go Championships.
He has done research work, published, and served as a speaker atnational and international conferences ona variety oftopics, from algebraic number theory, through the design of expert systems, to garue algorithms.
Return to the Table of Contents