Learning to Code in the Unity 3D Development Platform

Unity (Unity.com) is thought of as a game engine, however in recent years it is identified as a real-time 3D development platform. Part of its power is the underlying object hierarchy of 2D and 3D visual, interactive, audio, and physics objects that can be fully defined in a sophisticated drag and drop development environment. Another part of its power is that it is fully programmable in C#. In fact, fully implementing a project requires 'hooking up' C# functions. Via C# you can even customize the development environment. The bottleneck for Unity designers is learning to navigate the requisite C# code. Unity is gradually being used in courses and workshops outside of the SIGCSE community to teach coding, especially at the high school level. It also has a substantial following among independent novice game developers who do not have formal training in computer science. This workshop is an opportunity for CS educators to (1) get an intense introduction to the Unity development environment, (2) have the object model explained using well-established SIGCSE terminology and perspective, (3) explore and discuss the feasibility of using Unity to teach introductory computer science.