Education Feature: 'Faculty Postmortem: Cal Poly Pomona'

Author: by Beth A.

Today's Gamasutra educational feature, part of the expanded Gamasutra Education section of the site, brings together postmortems from the Intro to Game Development course at Cal Poly Pomona, taught by Robert W. Kerbs. Assistant Professor Kerbs sets up the course in the following extract: "I created a 10-week course that would allow senior-level CS students the opportunity to conceive, design, and implement a 3D PC game. This course, Intro to Game Development, was offered for the first time in Spring 2006. Each game was required to have three different levels, each with increasing difficulty. I selected OpenGL for the graphics pipeline, GLUT for event handling and models, OpenAL for sound effects, Microsoft’s MCI API to play back CD audio tracks, and Lua to script game-state information. C and C++ were used to implement the game engine and to put it all together. Although offered as a senior-level course, students had differing strengths. Some had taken the 2D/3D computer graphics course (where we teach OpenGL), some had taken the AI course, some had taken the operating systems course, and so on. Consequently, students selected their teammates not simply based upon who they knew, but also based on their perception of student skill bases. The prerequisite I required for all students was completion of the C++ programming course we offer." You can read the full Gamasutra educational feature on the topic to find out how Kerbs' students fared in game development (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from external websites).