For the first 6 weeks of this summer's internships, I had my intern, who had never seen .Net or C# in his life, working on various little tutorial tools. A console "kill" command for processes, an ASP.Net document share application, the data access layer for a requirements tracking system, etc.

However, I know that all CS majors want to be game developers. Hell, I did. So, last week I unveiled his final project while he's here. He and I are working on a Battleship (Milton Bradley) clone in XNA. He's been really excited, and all I've really done for him is some photoshopping of textures and little prods here and there in the right direction. I wrote the requirements for him and we sat and dissected them for an exercise in OOA&D, then off he went. The menu system is done and we're moving on to the gameplay screen now.

I'm really excited for him, because this will be something he can take back to his senior year in college and really show off. It's gotten him really excited about software development in general, but game development particularly.

Have any of you ever used game development as a teaching tool?

I've talked with several community college professors around the country (US) and most of them are using the approach of teaching introduction to programming by teaching game programming.  I'm not convinced that should be the first program a student should try to tackle, but there is definitely a movement in that direction.  Most people I know who are programmers got into computers and programming in particular because of video games.  It is only fitting that early on in the process a person can take their newly attained knowledge and create a game (or at least a graphics demo) with it.

Funny you should ask! I am currently an intern learning things in the process of making a game! ;)

kewlniss:

I've talked with several community college professors around the country (US) and most of them are using the approach of teaching introduction to programming by teaching game programming.  I'm not convinced that should be the first program a student should try to tackle, but there is definitely a movement in that direction.

This upcoming school year, Rice University's Intro to Game Programming is becoming an alternative to the into CS class for CS majors. And I'll be labbie for it :)

The first half of the semester (approx.) is lectures in class using Wolfram's Mathematica with small assignments building on each other each day, and weekly lab time using XNA to learn some of the C# syntax. The second half of the semester each student will be making a small game (think Space Invaders size... with artwork done by themselves =o) with XNA, being free to prototype things they want to do using Mathematica. (While XNA can prototype things quickly, Mathematica can prototype some things [esp. mathematical things, hence the name] even faster, and since it's not compiled, there's no waiting for that process. Mathematica even has networking!)

I wrote a set of XNA tutorials for a college grant I was asked to do.  The reason for the grant was to provide a simple game development curriculum for High School students to get them interested in programming and on a game development path if they focused on games.  That's cool your company allowed you to do that as an intern project.  I would consider continuing to do that if you continue to employ interns.  Ask them what they're interested in and work on them with something, sounds like a great capstone for an internship.