Introduction

There has been much interest in the use of game development in undergraduate courses outside game design programs. Reasons for this include student motivation and the possibility of a multidisciplinary approach. Here we will present our experience with a Computer Graphics (CG) course taught to computer science and computer engineering students in Brazilian universities.

This course uses a top-down approach and involves the development of a computer game as the term project. We use Java 3D as the graphics API, and some learning support tools. Two of these tools have been developed at our research lab: Interlab3D, an interactive interpreter for Java 3D classes and scene graph builder and viewer; and enJine, a didactic Java game engine.

At first we did not plan to discuss game issues in our CG course. The use of games to support the learning process was naturally incorporated into our methodology as the course evolved. Today, game issues permeate almost every aspect of the course and we are very happy (and, hopefully, so are our students) with the results. In this article we will present and discuss the course methodology, the game project, the software tools and some results.