Computer Game Programming Engines for Computational Science Development

Author: Kris Stewart (San Diego State University)

Abstract

The popularity of computer games has overtaken movies and other diversion among students these days. At San Diego State University we have found that a computer science course, for advanced undergraduates and graduate students, in computer game programming is a successful curriculum as well as a useful platform for developing science education modules to use in secondary schools. We will demonstrate our use of the Torque Game Engine to visualize the concept of Electric and Magnetic Phenomena from the California State Science Standard (5n) for a high school physics teacher at a local high school hear SDSU. We will also discuss the university curriculum developed to teach object oriented programming using Torque Script so that teams of students could have the experience of building their own 3d game program that will run cross-platform on a wide variety of platforms. We see this as an exciting collaboration between computer science and traditional science, a future strength for computational science.