Game Jams: An Innovative Education Experience in Higher Education

D. Gledhill and M. Novak

Department of Computer Science, University of Huddersﬁeld, Huddersﬁeld, U.K.

Keywords:

Team based Learning, Project based Learning, Immersive Learning, Game-based Learning.

Abstract:

Team based learning has been a signiﬁcant component of games design/art and programming courses at the

University of Huddersﬁeld, but not without challenges. A solution that maintains the beneﬁts of team based

learning while solving some of the challenges was sought. Game Jams are a popular method for rapid game

development. The Game Jam idea is reﬁned for the higher education sector and details presented, with pos-

itive results mostly focused on student engagement but also includes more achievable scoping and improved

communication.

1 INTRODUCTION

The two games courses at the University of Hudder-

sﬁeld, Computer Games Design and Computer Sci-

ence with Games Programming, have included team

based learning (TBL) modules on all 3 years of the

full time degrees since their beginnings in 2006 and

2004 respectively. (Michaelsen and Sweet, 2008)

highlights the three main concepts of TBL as:

1) group work being central to exposing students to,

and improving their skills in, course content

2) the vast majority of time being focused on group

work

3) that there are multiple group assignments designed

to improve learning and promote self managed teams.

(Michaelsen and Sweet, 2008) expands the concepts

with four essential elements of TBL as:

• Groups must be properly formed and managed

• Students must be accountable for the quality of

their individual and group work

• Students must receive frequent and timely feed-

back

• Group assignments must promote both learning

and team development

To meet the four essential elements, each of them

can be linked with the TBL modules as follows.

Groups are self determined in the ﬁrst instance, usu-

ally around friendship groups, with the rest of the co-

hort distributed amongst those nascent teams. The

groups are managed by the module team on a weekly

basis, with local management implemented through

the use of agile development methods, for example

SCRUM, and democratic decision making. Account-

ability is also derived from the agile development

methods and through a peer assessment system im-

plemented at the end of the module. Frequent and

timely feedback is given weekly during tutorial ses-

sions where each group presents their progress on the

game development and the module team can feedback

in real time. Finally, the assignment to build a game

prototype promotes team development and skill learn-

ing and improvement, both skills being necessary to

build a successful prototype.

Despite many years of operation, the TBL ap-

proach in the module does include several challenges.

A solution that maintains the beneﬁts and four es-

sential elements of TBL whilst also attempting to

solve some of the weaknesses is the focus of this pa-

per. This paper presents the traditional approach used

in these modules in detail, followed by the presen-

tation of an alternative approach, its reﬁnement for

use in higher education and its implementation in the

2018/2019 academic year. Observed changes, both

positive and challenges still to overcome, are pre-

sented followed by some interesting and somewhat

unexpected outcomes ﬁnishing with conclusions.

2 TRADITIONAL APPROACH

When the games courses were being developed the

idea of team based learning (TBL) was considered an

essential part of the learning process. The software

skills and approaches from other modules would be

brought together with team based working skills to

Gledhill, D. and Novak, M.

Game Jams: An Innovative Education Experience in Higher Education.

DOI: 10.5220/0007768304890494

In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2019), pages 489-494

ISBN: 978-989-758-367-4

489

allow the students to build a small game. The bene-

ﬁts of TBL are well documented (Michaelsen et al.,

2002) and so are not the focus of this paper. In all

three years of the full time degrees, the team modules

follow the same basic approach.

1) Teams are formed in the ﬁrst week. In the ﬁrst year

these tend to be a little more random as students have

not yet had time to form friendship groups. In second

year they tend toward friendship groups and in ﬁnal

year it is a little more mixed as there is a combination

of students continuing directly from second year and

some students returning from a placement year in in-

dustry. Students are also more aware of each others

skills and capabilities and often form teams for suc-

cess rather than just friendships.

2) Game concepts are developed and presented to the

module tutors over the next few weeks. This includes

some level of skills gap analysis on behalf of the team

and an overview of scoping for the module team.

3) Prototypes and alpha versions are built during

the ﬁrst semester and presented before moving into

semester 2. User testing, re-scoping, design tweaks

and technical experimentation all form part of this

phase.

4) The ﬁnal phase which lasts all of semester 2 is to

work through the rest of a software development cycle

of beta, including further player testing, and release

versions.

Throughout this process, the module team are there to

monitor and feedback on progress and decisions being

made. There is also an element of project manage-

ment, although there is certainly a focus on the teams

self managing their workloads.

2.1 Challenges

The teaching teams have many years experience lead-

ing TBL modules and have experienced myriad chal-

lenges.

The students take 6 modules in ﬁrst year, 5 mod-

ules in second year and 4 modules in ﬁnal year (dif-

ferent size modules but always a total of 120 credits).

All modules run over the full 24 week academic year.

One of the more intrusive disruptions to team based

modules is the impact of workload and assessment in

the other modules. Workload is relatively consistent

over the year with the inevitable peaks around assess-

ment time, but as those assessment dates approach,

the team project module is most often the ﬁrst module

to be abandoned. Near assessment dates, output drops

to almost nothing, always with the best intentions of

catching up later, but very rarely actually recovering

enough to be at the expected stage of development.

With such a long project and only a few hours per

week dedicated to the module content, idea fatigue

and general boredom at the slow progress occur, par-

ticularly in teams where members are not all enthusi-

astic about the idea or it is being heavily led by one or

two members. Another impact of longevity relates to

ongoing health or mental health issues with students

and the impact on the overall team.

Communication issues are one of the biggest chal-

lenges that develop. Different levels of enthusiasm,

workload peaks at different times, external factors

such as employment, family or social and even sleep

patterns can impact on team communication. Missed

attendance at weekly sessions means team members

can be out of touch for 2-3 weeks and lose motivation

to continue with the project. Poor communication of

ideas, personality conﬂicts, task allocation and feed-

back within the team all lead to challenges.

These major issues and a myriad smaller chal-

lenges result in disengagement and inevitably poor

achievement in the module. The module teams re-

quire a system that maintains the beneﬁts of team

based learning while trying to solve the challenges

highlighted.

3 LITERATURE REVIEW

Since the ﬁrst “Indie Game Jam” in 2002 (Kultime,

2015), the game jam has given game developers

a method of rapidly prototyping game ideas, with

some real-world successes (Wikipedia, 2019) evolv-

ing from those embryonic “compressed development

processes” (Zook and Riedl, 2013).

Game jams have taken many forms over the years.

Themes can be as simple as a single word, picture,

sound or sentence, to more societal concerns or sen-

sitive subjects to solving challenging problems. Time

frames can be from 1 hour (0hgame, 2018) to 2 weeks

(Game Jolt, 2017) and take place in myriad locations,

from Universities to castles, planes to trains (Lindvay

and Wallick, 2019).

Game jams give students a better understand-

ing of prototyping practices in software development

(Fowler et al., 2013) and develop effective collabora-

tion skills (Musil et al., 2010)

Others have used game jams as an educational

tool, for example (Scott and Ghinea, 2013) using

game jams to teach issues of accessibility in games.

It would be remiss not to mention the most suc-

cessful game jam, the Global Game Jam, which in

2018 had 42,811 participants in 108 countries mak-

ing 8,606 games (Global Game Jam, 2019), and about

which many papers have been written (Shin et al.,

; Hrehovcsik et al., 2016; Fowler and Arya, 2013).

CSEDU 2019 - 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

490

The huge impact of the Global Game Jam inspired

the module team to consider game jams as a potential

solution to the team based learning challenges faced

at Huddersﬁeld.

4 THE NEW APPROACH

For the second year team project module, a novel and

innovative approach that attempts to solve some of

the concerns of the traditional module structure while

maintaining all of the beneﬁts of team based learning

methods.

The main considerations for the new approach

were:

1. Maintain the beneﬁts of team based learning

2. Improve attendance and engagement

3. Maintain enthusiasm

4. Reduce the opportunity for conﬂicts to arise

5. Improve retention and attainment

(Kultime, 2015), after studying many papers, de-

ﬁnes a Game Jam as “... an accelerated opportunistic

game creation event where a game is created in a rel-

atively short timeframe exploring given design con-

tsraint(s) and end results are shared publicly”. This

provided a potential solution to the problem, shorten-

ing the timeframe being a key factor, but also meeting

the considerations above.

Guidance for the “rules” of a Game Jam were sug-

gested by (Musil et al., 2010) as being:

1. Rapid prototyping

2. Thematic constraint

3. Anyone can participate (if one can contribute)

4. Time constraint of 24-48 hours

5. Ad-hoc teams and small team sizes

6. Software and hardware agnosticism

7. Public presentation and judging at the end of the

event

These “rules” were further reﬁned and to some ex-

tent softened later by (Fowler and Arya, 2013; Fowler

et al., 2013) and presented as:

1. Goal of small and experimental games within a

limited timeframe

2. Previously unknown theme

3. Anyone can participate (if one can contribute)

4. No team formation before the event and limited

size of teams

5. Hardware and software agnosticism

6. Public presentation (sometimes) and judging at

the end of the event

These two sets of “rules” for a Game Jam were

developed within the constraints of the academic en-

vironment to create a proposed new set of “rules”:

1. Game Jams would be one week long and take

place outside of the normal teaching weeks to

minimise disruption and maximise time on the

project

2. Three Game Jams are undertaken to meet the min-

imum number of hours required for a module.

3. There are also 4 lectures for academic content de-

livery, such as an introduction to agile software

development methodologies and tools and for re-

ﬂection after each of the game jams

4. Each Game Jam would have a unique theme

5. Teams are alternated for each of the Game Jams

to allows students to work with as many of their

peers as possible

6. Hardware and software agnosticism within the

constraints of University provision

7. Final game presentations to all peers and an “open

house” demonstration for all students and staff

Because of the restrictions placed on university

scheduling some structure had to be implemented to

ensure the smooth running of the Game Jams. This

has to be balanced with the minimum contact hours

for university module tutors. The structure for each

Game Jam evolved to give more emphasis to the

teams working independently of the academic tutors,

with more contact in the ﬁrst jam, less in the second

and least in the third. As an example, Game Jam 1

has 15 hours of tutor contact and 20 hours of directed

study and the third game jam is 10 hours of tutor con-

tact and 25 hours without.

To allow for some planning the teams and theme

are announced the week before the game jam starts.

The ﬁrst two game jam team structures of 6 de-

signer/artist roles and 2 programmers are decided by

the module team. They are randomly allocated in the

ﬁrst game jam and then randomly sorted for the sec-

ond ensuring no student works with another student

they have worked with in the ﬁrst game jam. For the

third game jam, students are asked to form their own

teams. Although it is inevitable that some teams will

form around friendship groups, several teams have

formed around strength of skillset or desire to under-

take an enterprise placement year and form a com-

pany based on their game idea.

Each Game Jam week follows a similar structure

over the 5 days:

Game Jams: An Innovative Education Experience in Higher Education

491

Monday: Introduction, concepts, art bible develop-

ment and early programming experimentation

Tuesday: The ﬁrst early prototypes start to appear,

with some level of game play possible, albeit with

programmer art

Wednesday: Major leaps forward in development are

made here with more of the art assets starting to ap-

pear

Thursday: Further leaps forward are made with

playable demos for testing and reﬁnement of design

and art taking place

Friday:Last minute ﬁxes for the programmers with the

designers and artists moving to presentation building

followed by presentations in afternoon after a short

”open house” session for other students and staff to

see the outcomes

Although the results of the Game Jams are pre-

sented to the whole cohort, including members of the

academic staff and students from across the degree,

there still a requirement for summative grading. The

teams are awarded a higher percentage of their grades

based on team performance rather than the product

that they develop to ensure a team with weaker skilled

members can still perform at a high standard. This

is moderated through a peer-assessment exercise with

individual grades awarded based on a peer driven

shifting of the awarded team grade. There is also a

reﬂective element to the assessment through a ﬁnal

individual assessment which considers a minimum of

three aspects of their Game Jam experience from a list

of nine points:

• Technical Knowledge

• Professional Conduct

• Motivation

• Communication

• Initiative

• Working with Others

• Self-organisation

• Judgement

• Adaptability

In order to evidence the process for quality assur-

ance purposes, each team is given a notebook. This

took a physical form in the ﬁrst game jam, but was

replaced with a cloud based collaborative document

in the second. There is also a discord

server for

team communication which is locked to each team.

The programmers use Git to version control their code

with also shows how the programming developed. To-

gether, these form a ”paper trail” for the module tu-

tors to follow all discussions, minuted meetings, logs

https://discordapp.com/

and see how the ideas evolved over the week and how

well the team worked together across all assessed el-

ements. Final games are compiled and submitted and

the presentations are ﬁlmed for review and external

moderation.

A summary table of the changes between the tra-

ditional approach and new approach can be seen in

Table 1: Summary of changes in approach.

Old New

Timescale 2 hours per

week for 24

weeks

3 one week

blocks

Teams Same team all

year, chosen

at random

Change team

each Jam

Theme One theme One theme

per Jam

Presentation 3 presenta-

tions spread

across the

year

One presenta-

tion per Jam

5 OBSERVATIONS

After completing two of the three game jams for this

academic year, observations have been similar for

both of them. In each game jam, 8 games were made

(i.e. 1 per team) to various states of completion. Other

than 2 students, the most rewarding outcome was to-

tal and uninterrupted engagement from all students

across the full 5 days, with a signiﬁcant number of

students working outside of the ofﬁcial hours. There

were no signiﬁcant communication issues or conﬂicts

to resolve and everyone was still very energised at the

end of the week.

5.1 Positives

By far the most positive outcome of these ﬁrst two

game jams has been the level of engagement seen

amongst the whole cohort. Students were excited and

enthusiastic before the game jam, were present for all

of each day, were engaged in the development with-

out drifting onto other module work and were still ex-

cited when it came to the ﬁnal presentations on the

Friday. No other team based learning module has ex-

perienced close to that level of engagement over the

last 15 years.

This increased engagement and excitement has

meant that in every team, at least a prototype/alpha

build was achieved. An unexpected but very wel-

CSEDU 2019 - 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

492

come outcome in several instances was that the de-

veloped games far exceeded most games made in pre-

vious years, despite only 1 week of work versus a full

academic year in the past.

The teams were generally very good at scoping

within the time frame. Given a whole academic year,

students consistently over scoped but with such a

short time frame they focused better and created more

realistic ideas.

Communication was excellent throughout the

whole week, from in person during the day to online

on the discord servers in the evenings. Being in the

same place for 6-8 hours over 5 days forced the stu-

dents into regular verbal discussion without the long

quiet periods of whole year projects.

5.2 Challenges

One student did not engage in the second game jam

and has now left the course. One student partially en-

gaged in both game jams and despite repeated discus-

sions offered no reason for only partial engagement.

This impact on the 2 teams was mitigated through re

scoping and careful task allocation.

For the ﬁrst game jam, a paper based approach

was used for recording and evidencing, i.e. minutes

of meetings, game designs, art bibles, programming

logs etc. This was quickly realised to be a problem.

Only one team member could write in the log at once,

one team left it at home for one day and it was chal-

lenging to print content only to be glued into the book.

For the second game jam, a cloud based collabora-

tive document was used. This could be edited by all

team members simultaneously, couldn’t be physically

left anywhere and by using different colour fonts for

each team member can be reliably used for evidenc-

ing team members contributions.

The discord server proved to be a double edged

sword in the ﬁrst game jam. Because students were

expected to evidence their communications during the

week, one team decided to speak very little and main-

tain a detailed discord log. On reﬂection they felt that

this hindered their communication somewhat. Clarity

was added for the second game jam and much more

appropriate use of discord was used alongside verbal

communication.

6 OBSERVED CHANGES IN

LEARNERS

Other than the aforementioned signiﬁcant improve-

ments seen to engagement and attendance with the

team project module, an increase in excitement for

the module and the possibilities was observed. This

manifested in some teams meeting before the start of

the game jam to discuss early concepts, a more socia-

ble yet productive working environment and a general

sense of giddiness throughout the week.

A reduction of 20 credits of the typical second

year workload during the teaching weeks has seen

an increased output in the other 100 credits across all

modules. Skills developed during the game jams, hav-

ing been honed in a short time frame, are being seen

in other modules with an overall increase in perfor-

mance across the board being observed, although this

can not be proven until the end of the year once results

are calculated.

One unexpected observation has been an improve-

ment in a few students social engagement with the rest

of the cohort. Being forced to work with new peo-

ple and spending a large portion of time with them

culminating in a presentation to the whole group has

”brought them out of their shell” and led to much bet-

ter integration in the peer group.

7 OBSERVED CHANGES IN

ACADEMICS

There have been some unexpected changes in the

module tutors. Spending a compressed time with the

students, without the usual week long breaks, has

made it much easier to learn and remember the stu-

dents names. This makes for easier communication

in other modules and an improved sense of belonging

for the students.

A second beneﬁt is a greater understanding of

each students capabilities, including those not usually

taught by the team, i.e. the programming students.

Seeing the teams at work and their ideas evolving

is infectious and creates a lot of excitement for enter-

prise placement year and placements in general.

8 UNINTENDED BENEFITS TO

OTHER MODULES

Some unintended, although somewhat expected, ben-

eﬁts have been observed in other modules by running

the team project in this game jam approach.

Students have appeared to be more engaged

in their other modules compared to previous year

groups. The perceived beneﬁts to student engagement

is that other module leaders have anecdotally noticed

the lack of using team project as a previously com-

mon excuse for not progressing on assignments. Stu-

Game Jams: An Innovative Education Experience in Higher Education

493

dents have previously used the focus on team work

and peer pressure as a reason for disengagement or

lack of progress on other assignments.

The approach has been so successful that the ﬁnal

year team project is planning to adopt part of the ap-

proach for the next academic year. As a double size

module there is work being undertaken to run half of

the module traditionally and half following the game

jam method. The game jams will be used to make

signiﬁcant leaps forward in progress and the weekly

sessions between used for reﬁnement, player testing

and bug ﬁxing alongside design/programmer experi-

mentation.

Outside of the games programs, traditional com-

puter science and information systems module tutors

are now considering ways to implement the ideas into

their modules, through similar game jams or blend-

ing the theories with “hackathons” and developments

more appropriate to the disciplines.

9 CONCLUSIONS

The challenges faced by year long team based learn-

ing modules for games design/art and programming

students have led to difﬁculties with engagement and

ultimately achievement. A solution that maintains the

beneﬁts of team based learning while solving some or

all of those challenges is presented here following the

ideas of a game jam. Two of the three planned game

jams have taken place with remarkable improvements

in engagement and unexpected results in other areas.

Minor changes were made between the ﬁrst and sec-

ond game jams as the module team adapt to student

behaviours and reﬁne the methodology. It has been so

successful that other year groups and modules teams

from other courses are looking at ways to integrate the

ideas into their team based learning modules.

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