Design and Implementation of a Pivotal Unit in a Games Technology Degree

This paper reports the development and running of the first Games Development and Programming unit at Murdoch University, Western Australia. Unlike other Games courses which have been repackaged or re-modeled from existing multimedia courses, the proposed course and units are focused on meeting the needs of the industry and high level of academic standard. As such, great demands have been placed on the students. The unit objectives, structure and examples of assignments from the first batch of students are described in this paper. Experience has shown that the students were able to perform well with positive encouragement. Ability to work in a team also proved to be an important factor. This has shown to be related to the standard of the students’ work and it is also an essential attribute expected by the industry.