The Round Table (Rational Pagans Forum)

Learning the Art of Creating Computer Games Can Boot Student Skills

ScienceDaily (Jan. 24, 2010) — Computer games have a broad appeal that transcends gender, culture, age and socio-economic status. Now, computer scientists in the US think that creating computer games, rather than just playing them could boost students' critical and creative thinking skills as well as broaden their participation in computing. They discuss details in the current issue of the International Journal of Social and Humanistic Computing.

Nikunj Dalal, Parth Dalal, Subhash Kak, Pavlo Antonenko, and Susan Stansberry of Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, outline a case for using rapid computer game creation as an innovative teaching method that could ultimately help bridge the digital divide between those people lacking computer skills and access and those with them. "Worldwide, there is increasing recognition of a digital divide, a troubling gap between groups that use information and communication technologies widely and those that do not," the team explains. "The digital divide refers not only to unequal access to computing resources between groups of people but also to inequalities in their ability to use information technology fully."

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Trying to achieve something interesting can certainly be a good motivator for learning how to do something.

However, something similar has happened in the programming world off and on, without much success -- trying to make programming languages more natural-language-like to make them easier to learn. However, such efforts have not been very successful, and the more hardcore sorts of programmers often disdain such efforts as needlessly verbose.

COBOL
SQL
AppleScript
...

To see what programming languages tend to look like, go to 99 Bottles of Beer - a huge list of programs for generating the words of that song.