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“ Computer game design ” : How to motivate engineering students to integrate technology with reflection

The core intention of computational visualistics – a 5-year engineering diploma programme introduced at the university of Magdeburg, Germany in 1996 – is to integrate technical know-how of all kinds of generating and processing of digital images with the reflection on pictures and on the contexts of use of technical devices as performed in the humanities. Although these interdisciplinary intentions are widely agreed upon, students often feel less motivated to actually materialize this integration as they mostly find one set of lectures dealing more or less exclusively with technical aspects, and another set dealing predominantly with the perspectives from, e.g., psychology or educational science. While the advantage of learning “across the boundaries” of Snow's Two Cultures is quite accepted, the motivation for doing so often wanes in the face of the effort. In search of a theme for a lecture allowing us to deal with technical and reflective aspects of something relevant for visualistics that would simultaneously gain a high level of motivation from the students, ‘computer game design’ fell into our view, and proved, on careful examination, to be ideal for that purpose. This paper describes, as a case study, the background, structure, and effect of the resulting lecture. THE (NAÏVE) IMAGE OF COMPUTER SCIENTISTS AND A PROBLEM OF MOTIVATION No doubt, communicative and social competence is the keystone for the success of every engineer; the best technical knowledge is not enough to make a good engineer without the abilities to consider the non-technical preconditions and implications of a technical problem at hand, and to communicate the quality of a proposed solution to those affected by the consequences. Without these abilities, in the best case scenario, what would be achieved would be a narrow-minded genius in the proverbial ebony tower, and somebody else helping out with the translations for the outside world. More probable, however, might be somebody dealing with the engineering tasks at hand in a technocratic way, ie solving the problems by considering their technical dimensions alone, and not caring for anything else. Unfortunately, the public image of engineers, which often seems to be shared by engineering students, tends more to the latter caricature as, for example, Ahearn has observed [1]. Engineers, amongst them in particular computer scientists, are imagined to be specialists for their respective domains but more or less handicapped in all verbal respects (exceptions prove the rule): “Just look at all those incomprehensible manuals they produce.” Well, this is not to say that engineers are like that. Nevertheless, the traditional curricula offer little options to enhance the communicative and social skills of engineering students and they are seldom encouraged to extend their verbal competence. In order to help those who are not good communicators by nature already, courses are needed that concentrate on communication in practice (and not only amongst colleagues). Reflections about what engineers are supposed to do serve that purpose, too as seen in the more general framework of the humanities. Therefore, one can try to extend the amount of practical, problem-based projects where students have to practice team work, and of seminars where they have to give talks and prepare papers. One can also include into the curriculum lectures of the humanities with relevant themes. Our conception of computational visualistics [2] follows that path: Computational visualists are a subspecies of computer scientists, taught in particular to deal with all aspects of digital image generation and processing. The two thirds of their curriculum dedicated to technology, i.e., providing the methods (computer science, mathematics, formal logic), are accompanied by about 20% of courses dealing with reflections on the contexts of image use and on other non-technical aspects influencing their work as engineers – courses in fact offered by the faculties of psychology, philosophy, education science, political science, and design. In the remaining time (ca. 10%), the students deal with an example application domain where they learn about the particular difficulties when working for clients with completely different backgrounds, e.g., from medicine or material science. So far, we might assume that the students in computational visualistics are lucky as they have certainly got many opportunities for developing into good communicators with a lot of practice and a solid theoretical background as well. However, students often feel less motivated to actually materialize the integration, although the interdisciplinary intentions are widely agreed upon. The caricature of a computer scientist as mentioned above is often used by the students in order to deflect any claims on them of being supposed to deal with such ‘soft’ fields of competence in opposition to the simple, strict, and clear approaches they are used to in mathematics, logic, and the technical domains. “I want to be an engineer, so I don’t