Teaching game design through cross-disciplinary content and individualized student deliverables

Video game development is used to teach collaborative software engineering principles. However, when the collaboration is exclusively between computer scientists, a balkanized perspective is unintentionally promoted. A multidisciplinary faculty addressed how to exploit video game development as a vehicle for a collaborative cross-disciplinary experience in technology development for upper-level students from our contributing majors. This paper addresses the issues of curriculum structure, student assessment and cross-disciplinary team teaching. We present a dual model of cross-disciplinary content and individualized deliverables that allows each student to determine how narrowly or broadly to focus his/her personal learning.