Berita Kampus

The Dawn of New-Age Gaming

Learning from the best... one of the presenter during the GDCSE08 Conference.

The third annual Games Development in Computer Science Education (GDCSE) conference held aboard the Celebrity Century cruise ship in Miami, Florida earlier this year was truly a meeting of minds between Games Gurus from both renowned universities and the industry respectively. The conference, jointly organized by Microsoft Research and Electronic Arts served as an invaluable platform for local aspiring games developers to enhance their knowledge by learning from the best in the industry. It focused mainly on the academic efforts of using computer and console games within the Computer Science curriculum.

The College is proud that one of its lecturers, Mr Stephen Tang from the Computer Science Division was chosen as one of the five Malaysian representatives sponsored by the Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC) and Microsoft Malaysia to attend the conference. During The five-day conference, free-flow of information, sharing of knowledge and best practices on pertinent issues such as the use of computer games as an attraction to teach computer science units, curriculum framework, experiences on running games degrees and technology platforms for creating games such as XNA and TorqueX development tool were presented to computer science educators and researchers around the world.

“Many of these talks are very informative to us and provides useful guide on how Malaysia can grow the interactive industry especially the games industry. I must admit that I am greatly impressed by the initiatives and efforts taken by Universities and Colleges in US and region around to attract students into the studies of computer games as part of the plan to increase the intakes of science, technology, engineering and mathematics study area…. And such efforts are very well supported by government and industry.” said Stephen, an

active researcher on game-based learning and TAR College representative in the MuM (MDeC, University and Microsoft Collaboration) Project.

At the conference, Stephen had the opportunity to give a demonstration of STEPHY to Mr Dennis Cosgrove from Alice Project Team at Carnegie Mellon University. STEPHY is a 2D visualization environment that aids learners to learn programming. The working prototype was wholly architected and developed by final year students from the Advanced Diploma in Science (Information Systems Engineering) course at TAR College and supervised by Mr Stephen himself. According to Stephen, Dennis was impressed with the work produced by the College students and have also given some valuable comments on how to improve STEPHY taking lessons learnt from the Alice Project.

Game with a cause... Stephen explaining to Cosgrove the advantages of STEPHY in helping students learning programming.

Serious gaming with STEPHY... screenshot of the game in progress.

Serious Gaming with STEPHY

Many students who are weak in programming language usually dread the subject. Instead of having a good understanding of the subject, they tend to study superficially through memorization of syntaxes. In order to overcome this problem, Gan Chu Hang, Heng Kean Keat, Jonathan Ng and Tan Eu Hua, four friends from the Information Systems Engineering course joined hands to develop a game simulation with the aim to help students in the learning of computer programming. With that, STEPHY was born.

STEPHY is a computer game that requires the player to navigate its title character through terrain, picking up valuable objects and attacking enemies in order to successfully get through to the next level. As opposed to the usual ‘hack and slash’ Role Playing Games (RPG) available in the market which utilize the mouse, the player control the character’s action through typing in the correct programming logic. With such a creative approach, the game helps to motivate struggling students to be more receptive in learning the flow of programming codes, syntaxes, variables and control statements in a fun and engaging manner.

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