Motivation of the Students in Game Development Projects

摘要

At the "Berufsbildenden Schule fur Gewerbe und Technik" (a school providing vocational education) in Trier/Germany, students are taught to work out software projects. Terms of reference taken from the field of game development are used to work out, deepen and reflect theme object oriented programming and elementary array-algorithms. The "Duale Ausbildung" ("dual education" , apprenticeship) in Germany is a fundamental institution for training qualified IT- personnel. This education is marked by a high level of practical experience acquired in companies combined with learning theoretical content at professional schools. Regarding the different levels of student knowledge, the classes often have a high level of heterogeneity. There is a certain danger that the individual learner cannot cope with the expectations or, on the contrary, that he is not challenged enough. It can happen that in some groups absolute software-development beginners and well-experienced people are mixed, and that the heterogeneous composition of classes makes motivation a key-element for a successful lesson. Our educational concept is based on the principle of constructivism [2]. The teaching has to leave the instructional role and move towards the task of creating a "learning room" which sets up the learning-environment and in this way promotes, moderates and accompanies self-controlled learning. The professional daily routine of an developer is strongly connected with projects. Our lecture style is based on project-oriented learning [1]. A few projects were performed in the past. The students in the class had heterogeneous graduations: 40% had an A-level, 40% had a Realschulabschluss (the German equivalent of GCSEs) and 20% had a Hauptschulabschluss (the German equivalent of CSE). Furthermore, few students had much expert knowledge in software-development, some students had little experience and a couple of students had no job-related experience in software-development projects. Two classes with 33 students were questioned as to how the concept of educational process was dealt with in the past. About 2 to 4 students worked together on one game-development project. The result of the student-feedbacks is presented in table 1. The motivation and the group solidarity was evaluated as excellent by the students. The topic "game development" leads to a high level of motivation and enthusiasm for working on the material from the students. Furthermore, the topic acts as an integration concept in heterogeneous groups. With this label it was possible to deepen and strengthen the theoretical contents of the array operations, the object oriented design and development. Some of the competences could'not be developed by all our students due to the group structures, but only within these structures of the project it did become possible to concentrate intensively on the individual competence weaknesses and wishes. During the implementation phase, we could individually elaborate the needs of the students and offer specific help and incentive measures. We consider these projects as useful and practical tasks which could be added to the daily school routine as additional help for the professional work of students and as a valuable preparation for final exams.