EUROGRAPHICS 2016/ B. Sousa Santos and J. M. Dischler Education Paper A Video Games Technologies Course: Teaching, Learning, and Research G. Amador 1,2 A. Gomes 1,2 1 Universidade da Beira Interior, Covilhã, Portugal. 2 Instituto de Telecomunicações, Portugal. Abstract In the last decade, several higher education institutions began to provide courses and/or degrees in games content creation, games design, and games development, largely because of the astonishing growth of games as one of the most powerful indus- tries worldwide. This paper presents the course entitled “Video Games Technologies”, including its history, goals and method- ology, as part of a MSc degree in Computer Science and Engineering. The focus is on the technologies, techniques, algorithms, data structures, and mathematics behind the design and development of game engines, instead of games themselves. Categories and Subject Descriptors (according to ACM CCS): K.3.2 [Computers and Education]: Computer and Information Science Education—Computer Science Education; K.8.0 [Personal Computing]: General—Games 1. Introduction In order to deal with the needs of the game industry [Ip12], higher education institutions worldwide have introduced novel courses and/or degrees in the last two decades [McG12]. In general, we have two sorts of degrees in games. The first is more design and arts-oriented, so that they essentially are bachelor/master degrees in game design [CMA10]. The second sustains on computer science, so that they are bachelor/master degrees in game development and programming [Sun09]. We also find game-related courses in many degree course structures in arts, design, and computer science. The course briefly described in this paper, called Video Games Technologies, is part of the MSc in Computer Science and Engi- neering at the Universidade da Beira Interior, Covilhã, Portugal. The focus of this course is not on the design, prototyping, and de- velopment (including programming) of video games. Instead, the leading idea of this course is to highlight the mathematics, data structures, and algorithms that sustain the design and development of game engines (e.g., Unity3D [Dic15]). In other words, the idea is not to build up a game, but to master the technologies behind game engines. The Video Games Technologies course is one of the optative courses of the MSc in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Beira Interior. Its focus on game engine technologies makes it different from the common game programming and de- velopment courses, as those we find in standard curricula as argued by Ritzhaupt [Rit09]. Furthermore, in order to develop the student motivation and curiosity, the course promotes the learning by ex- ample, being the students led to tackle open issues and challenges at the research level. So, students end up learning how to extend a game engine architecture by integrating novel features (e.g., data structures and lagorithms) in either game sub-engine, not matter it is a graphics engine, physics engine, artificial intelligence engine, or else. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews previous work related with lecturing and learning video games technologies. Section 3 overviews the video games technologies course history. Sections 4 to 7 detail the course: objectives; pre- requisites; syllabus; methodology, i.e., students assessment and teaching methodology vs learning objectives. Sections 8 and 9 pro- vide an preliminary assessment of the course methodology and a critical discussion on the proposed course syllabus and methodol- ogy. Finally, Section 10 draws relevant conclusions. 2. Related work In higher education courses, game engines are used as a basis upon which students rapidly develop a game prototype, simply because constructing a game from scratch (i.e., without the support of a game engine) is tiresome and takes so long time. On the other hand, some authors argue that simplified game en- gine tools such as, for example, the XNA framework [LS08], or smaller libraries as Slick or the LightWeight Java Gaming Library (LWJGL) [GHTS09], are more suited for teaching game develop- ment than mainstream industry game engines (e.g., Unity [Dic15]). The rationale behind this is threefold: mainstream game engine’s c  2016 The Author(s) Eurographics Proceedings c  2016 The Eurographics Association. DOI: 10.2312/eged.20161027