Researchers Make a Case For Learning Through Video Game Creation

ub3r n3u7r4l1st sends along this snippet from Science Daily: "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. ... '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.' There are many causes and proposed solutions to bridging this divide, but applying them at the educational and computer literacy level in an entertaining and productive way might be one of the more successful. The team adds that teaching people how to use off-the-shelf tools to quickly build a computer game might allow anyone to learn new thinking and computing skills."

Re:Computer Science != Computer Skills

[StripedCow]

Most of the programmers have great skills solving a computer science problem

Not really accurate. Computer scientists invent and analyze algorithms, whereas programmers just implement them.

Alice?

[blankinthefill]

This sounds a lot like an extension of Alice (http://www.alice.org/). The idea is that you learn to program by writing stories/scripts (in the movie sense, not the IT sense) with the various objects of the language. It sounds like they would like to extend beyond that, but in terms of rudimentary learning, Alice is great, and its a much softer introduction to thinking algorithmically/learning to program than something like C or C++ or Java right off the bat.