Gaming for middle school students: building virtual worlds

TLDR: It is demonstrated that students are more excited about Computing and Gaming after their camp experience and are interested in pursuing further studies in Gaming and Computing.

Abstract: We can begin engaging new talented students Computer Science students with Gaming as the introduction. Students are already excited and curious about games. Research studies suggests students form opinions about whether they enjoy science or non-science subjects as early as middle school. Furthermore, a student entering high school makes course selections based on their interests of preparing for college or not. The college prep course sequences are the best sequences to prepare students for college science majors including Computer Science. Therefore, it is important for the Gaming and Computing industries to focus our attention and resources on developing young talent at the middle school and early high-school years. The Computer Science Department at Spelman College has implemented one approach to address this need. We have implemented summer camp with follow-up workshops during the subsequent school year. Our summer camps are called CARE Summer Computer Camps and are funded by participant fees subsidized by an NSF [7] Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) grant. One of the major components of the CARE Camps is to introduce students to computer programming by building interactive virtual worlds. Constructing interactive virtual worlds is a necessary component to building games. Students are introduced to the design and implementation aspects of game development through virtual world development. In this paper we present our CARE curriculum and the results of our evaluations. We demonstrate that students are more excited about Computing and Gaming after their camp experience and are interested in pursuing further studies in Gaming and Computing.