Teaching Introductory Game Audio to Undergraduate Students

Using a Novel Digital Game Template

Claudio Carvilhe

1,2

, Christopher Hernandez

1,2

, Lucas Adamo

1,3

and Carlos N. Silla Jr.

1,2,4 a

Computer Music Technology Laboratory (Onloop), Graduate Program in Computer Science (PPGIa), Brazil

Polytechnic School of the Pontif

ıcia Universidade Cat

olica do Paran

a (PUCPR), Brazil

Fine Arts School of the Pontif

ıcia Universidade Cat

olica do Paran

a (PUCPR), Brazil

School of Information Technology, Halmstad University, Sweden

Keywords:

Game Audio, Music Production, Undergraduate Education, Teaching Game Audio,

Interdisciplinary Learning, Sound Design, Educational Game, Digital Game Development,

Pedagogical Strategies.

Abstract:

In this paper we describe the PUCPR SOUND GAME (PSG): a digital game template that was developed

in order to provide support for the game audio introductory teaching to undergraduate students of Digital

Games. To use the game, the student does not need to have prior knowledge of art, design or even digital

game programming. It was developed to abstract them from these matters, allowing them to create, test, and

reﬁne sound effects and music by easily changing ﬁles in the game template folder. From the teacher’s point

of view, the game speeds up the monitoring and feedback process since the productions are centralised in a

single place. The evaluation process is facilitated: the teacher is responsible for running the game containing

the complete sound package of each student, identifying whether or not it meets the established criteria. We

also present a thorough evaluation of eight different offerings of the module, being 4 without using PSG and

4 using PSG. The 8 offerings had the same learning objectives and were taught by the same teacher. The

analysis of the results shows that there was a signiﬁcant improvement in student learning and a reduction in

the number of failing students when using PSG.

1 INTRODUCTION

The digital games industry is expected to generate

over US$ 200 billion by the end of 2023 (Wijman,

2021). In the context of digital games development

game audio plays an important role (together with

game design, game programming and game art & ani-

mation) as it constitutes an element that is equally im-

portant to the complete player experience, along with

the visuals, plus game design, programming, feel, and

movement (Rabin, 2005). By Game Audio we are re-

ferring to the set of techniques for the production of

sounds for digital games. Although there are different

classiﬁcations for the audio elements in games, we

consider as game audio: music, ambient sounds and

sound effects (Horowitz and Looney, 2014).

The main advantage for future game developers to

understand the basics of game audio is related to be-

ing able to independently produce their own sounds

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1603-9378

and music in their projects. Even in the contexts

where the game developers will not produce the game

audio themselves, they will still beneﬁt from learning

game audio, as that will enable them to have a better

interaction with the person/team responsible for the

sound production. Furthermore, it is expected that

with some practice their games will start to provide

better immersion. As they move forward and learn

more about the potential of sound design, sound can

be used more powerfully as a vehicle to provide in-

formation that can support player decisions (Ng and

Nesbitt, 2013).

Despite the importance of game audio to game de-

velopment, to the best of the authors knowledge, there

are very few papers that discuss, investigate and ad-

dress the issues of teaching game audio to undergrad-

uate students. This might happen for mainly three rea-

sons: First, from the perspective of music students , in

order to create digital sound effects and soundtracks

for games, it would also be necessary to understand

more about the game development process and possi-

178

Carvilhe, C., Hernandez, C., Adamo, L. and Silla Jr., C.

Teaching Introductory Game Audio to Undergraduate Students Using a Novel Digital Game Template.

DOI: 10.5220/0012701100003693

In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2024) - Volume 1, pages 178-189

ISBN: 978-989-758-697-2; ISSN: 2184-5026

bly team up with game development students. How-

ever, not all universities that offer music-related de-

grees also offer game development degrees. Second,

from the perspective of game development students,

they might need to develop their own games as well

as the game audio for their games. Third, as stated by

Sinclair (Sinclair, 2020) it is difﬁcult to teach sound

design in a systematic manner, since context and in-

tention are important to the craft.

From a teacher’s perspective, depending on the

desired learning outcomes, it seems counter-intuitive

to make the students work on developing their games

in parallel to working on the game audio aspects.

However, this seems to be one of the common prac-

tices in the ﬁeld in the few papers that address this

issue. Wang and Olivieri (Wang and Olivieri, 2018)

reported their experience creating an interdisciplinary

course with a diverse group of students from differ-

ent areas (computer science and arts). One of their

goals was to stimulate the cooperation of a disparate

group of students as a learning opportunity by cre-

ating a game prototype (as a ﬁnal project) and pro-

ducing its sound, both collaboratively. The authors

were motivated in minimizing the gap between com-

puter science and arts and was inspired by different

approaches that uses art and music as a means (Brun-

vand and McCurdy, 2017) or as means to an end (Mc-

Cauley et al., 2017; Heines et al., 2012; Heines et al.,

2011) of the learning process itself. Differently from

the existing approaches, our premise is to abstract our

students from the topics of game art, game design

and game programming, focusing speciﬁcally on the

game audio.

It should be noted that this seems to be a com-

mon problem in teaching different technology-related

classes. For example, in the context of teaching artiﬁ-

cial intelligence, the idea of using game templates

has been successfully applied using classical video

games such as Pacman (Rohlfshagen et al., 2018) and

Super Mario (Karakovskiy and Togelius, 2012).

Inspired by the works of previous researchers and

educators in using game templates, the main contri-

butions of this paper are two-fold:

• To present a novel game template for teaching in-

troductory game audio, named PUCPR SOUND

GAME (PSG), which is freely available to be used

by other educators and students.

• To evaluate the effectiveness of using PSG as a

tool to support the teaching of introductory game

audio subjects to undergraduate students.

A Game template is a previously implemented game

solution that was developed to allow the students to focus

on speciﬁc learning outcomes, i.e. by implementing only

the content related to the classes being taught

The remainder of this paper is organized as fol-

lows. In section 2 we present the PSG, its instal-

lation and the sound effects and music that must be

produced by the students. In section 3 we present

our pedagogical strategies that are applied equally to

classes without or with PSG. In section 4 we present

our research method and strategies for evaluating the

effectiveness of using PSG. In section 5 we present

the results obtained from the use of PSG to support

the teaching and learning process. The fact that this

research was partially developed during the COVID-

19 pandemic and other threats to the validity of this

study are discussed in Section 6. Finally in Section 7

we present our ﬁnal remarks and future research di-

rections.

2 THE PUCPR SOUND GAME

(PSG)

The PUCPR SOUND GAME (PSG) is a novel digi-

tal game template, which was developed in the Digi-

tal Games Technology Course at our University. PSG

was developed with the aim of being a support tool for

teaching introductory game audio for digital games.

PSG was designed to allow the students to focus

only on the development of game audio aspects of the

game. Therefore, it was not constructed for the pur-

pose of entertainment where the student spends his

time in gameplay. PSG serves for the students to un-

derstand the sound elements, and for the students to

easily insert their own SFX and songs into the game.

The current version of PSG was developed in Unity.

The student can interact with PSG in two ways:

a) Playing Online with previously produced sounds.

b) Downloading the game to manipulate ﬁles and

folders and make their own sound.

The ﬁrst way is commonly used when the stu-

dent needs to understand the sound items present in

the game as a way of learning, by listening to a ver-

sion with previously produced sounds. In a second

moment, after understanding the sound items (both

sounds and music), the students are able to explore

the second way, which allows the replacement of the

current sounds present in the game for their own SFX

and music. From this second step, it is possible for the

students to improve their understanding of the fun-

damentals of game audio without the need for prior

knowledge about digital game programming.

Teaching Introductory Game Audio to Undergraduate Students Using a Novel Digital Game Template

179

2.1 General Flow and Game Interfaces

The game is composed of 3 (three) screens that make

a complete game loop, being them the Main menu

(presented in Figure 1), the Gameplay (presented in

Figure 2) and the Game over screen (presented in Fig-

ure 3). The gameplay is focused on a single level

where the students will be able to interact with the

environment and hear several sound elements in addi-

tion to the background music (gameplay music). It’s

important to point out that the only way out of this

screen is to follow the game over ﬂow by falling off

the cliff. It should be noted that the main menu, as

well as the game over screen also have speciﬁc back-

ground music.

Figure 1: Main Menu.

Figure 2: Gameplay.

Figure 3: Game over.

2.2 Installing PSG

The student is encouraged to start the learning process

by playing the game based on a pre-sounded version

available on the internet

. When playing, the focus is

to identify and create a list of the sound effects and

music they perceive in the game.

Once the student has identiﬁed the sound items

present in the game, the next learning goal is to in-

put his own sounds. They can access its sources from

the following link

Based on this link it is possible to download the

game. After obtaining the ﬁle PSG.ZIP, it is only nec-

essary to unzip the ﬁle in question and a folder struc-

ture will be created.

2.3 How to Insert Sound into the Game

After proceeding with the installation, which consists

of a mere unzipping, a folder structure will be created.

When accessing the unzipped folder, they can ﬁnd the

following folder structure:

Figure 4: Folder structure created.

Figure 4 shows the folder structure created for the

game. On the top in the main folder (PSG) they can

ﬁnd the PSG.EXE ﬁle. This ﬁle, when executed, runs

the game following the ﬂow of interfaces previously

described. Below the main folder there are several

ﬁles and folders, which consist of the source ﬁles

(programming and images) of the PSG game.

The SONS (sounds) folder contains the sub-

folders of interest to students - the SFX and MUSI-

CAS (music) folders. These folders will contain the

sound effects and music ﬁles needed to run the game.

All sound and music ﬁles available in the unzipped

version contain silence only. The sounding of PSG

will be done by replacing the existing ﬁles with new

ﬁles in each folder, but keeping in mind an important

detail: the ﬁles must have exactly the same names.

https://pucprsoundgame.netlify.app/

README from the Github Repository

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180

2.4 Files Available in SFX and

MUSICAS Folders

Table 1 presents the SFX ﬁles available in the game.

Each sound must be replaced by a ﬁle with exactly the

same name. The same rule is applied to the songs.

Table 1: Files in SFX folder.

File Description

sfx rain int.ogg Rain indoor

sfx wind.ogg Wind outdoor

sfx wind int.ogg Wind indoor

sfx grass1.ogg One step on grass (Variation 1)

sfx grass2.ogg One step on grass (Variation 2)

sfx grass3.ogg One step on the grass (Variation 3)

sfx grass4.ogg One step on the grass (Variation 4)

sfx wood1.ogg One step on wood (Variation 1)

sfx wood2.ogg One step on wood (Variation 2)

sfx wood3.ogg One step on wood (Variation 3)

sfx wood4.ogg One step on wood (Variation 4)

sfx shoot.ogg Shoot

sfx bonﬁre.ogg Bonﬁre

sfx jump.ogg Leap

sfx colect.ogg Sound of a collectable item

sfx wall.ogg Sound of wall breaking

The music folder contains 3 ﬁles, as described in

Table 2. The replacement for new songs follows the

same rule as SFX (the ﬁle must have the same name).

Table 2: Files in MUSICAS folder.

File Description

bgm menu.ogg Main menu music

bgm gameplay.ogg Gameplay music

bgm gameover.ogg Game over music

3 PEDAGOGICAL STRATEGIES

The module of introduction to Digital Game Audio is

offered every semester for students in their ﬁrst year

of their undergraduate Digital Game Technology de-

gree. At the end of the course, the student devel-

ops sound effects and songs that comprise the whole

sound package for a computer game. The remainder

of this section describes the learning outcomes, the

study topics, course project structure and student’s as-

sessment.

3.1 Learning Outcomes

At the end of the module the students will have devel-

oped:

• A project SFX library containing 16 produced,

edited and processed (SFX) items.

• A report detailing the editing and processing per-

formed for each SFX.

• A project’s Musical library containing 3 songs

(menu, game play and game over).

3.2 Study Topics

The module takes place once a semester and is offered

to freshmen (ﬁrst period of the course). There are no

prerequisites of any kind, which implies that students

in general have no prior knowledge of sound produc-

tion (as well as art and programming). The course has

a workload of 1h and 30 min per week for 18 weeks.

Table 3 details a summary of information about the

course.

3.3 Course Project Structure

The module project is divided into two phases. The

ﬁrst phase is intended for the production of sound ef-

fects that are inserted and tested in a game. While

studying the fundamentals of sound, digital audio and

sound production, the student learns to apply these

fundamentals from a practical point of view, develop-

ing a library of sound effects, duly edited, processed,

mixed and mastered. In phase 1 there is no evaluation

by grade - students receive feedback from the teacher

on the improvements that should be made for the next

phase.

3.4 Student’s Assessment

For the student grading, we introduce four different

stages presented in Table 4. Students are graded as

being: Autonomous (AU), for example, and it can be

achieved if, during the course, the teacher perceives

the presence of all the required sound effects, edited

and processed according to the established criteria,

with reﬁned mixing quality. Similar reasoning can be

applied for the grades Capable (CP); Apprentice (AP)

or Under Development (UD).

The second phase is dedicated to Music Produc-

tion (and review of sound effects based on the feed-

back from teacher and peers). At this point, the stu-

dent goes deeper into topics about music theory and

production and, at the same time as producing the

Available at: https://www.audacityteam.org/

Available at: https://www.presonus.com/

Available at: https://www.reaper.fm/

Available at: https://www.bandlab.com/

Available at: https://www.image-line.com/

Teaching Introductory Game Audio to Undergraduate Students Using a Novel Digital Game Template

181

Table 3: Study topics.

Study Topic Main Goals

Sound Design Fundamentals. Introduce the student to fundamental concepts of sound, principles

of acoustics and fundamentals relating to sound design for games.

Introduction to Sound Production. Provide the student a ﬁrst contact with Digital Audio Workstations

(DAWs), such as Audacity

, Studio One

, Reaper

so that they can

start their sound productions. Students learn the basics of audio

editing, processing and sound synthesis.

Introduction to Music Production. Provide the student an initial knowledge for producing their ﬁrst mu-

sical soundtracks. An introduction to music theory is covered and

additionally students use other types of DAWs such as BandLab

FL Studio

among others.

Introduction to the Sound De-

signer’s Workﬂow.

Introduce the student to the sound designer’s workﬂow for games

and their responsibilities in their day-to-day work.

Table 4: Student´s evolution.

Grade Description

Autonomous (AU) Fulﬁls 90% to 100% of activities

Capable (CP) Fulﬁls 70% to 89% of activities

Apprentice (AP) Fulﬁls 40% to 69% of activities

Under development (UD) Fulﬁls 0% to 39% of activities

songs, they make the necessary corrections in the

sound effects (if any). For this phase, we established

three criteria, concerning all aspects of a complete

digital game sound design:

1. Sound Effects Production (editing and processing)

- 40% of the grade. In this ﬁrst criterion we eval-

uate the SFX library produced by the students,

by considering the feedback from the ﬁrst phase.

Also, in this criterion it is important to carefully

evaluate the quality of each SFX produced by the

students at this point.

2. Music Production - 40% of the grade. In this sec-

ond criterion we evaluate the three new songs pro-

duced, mixed and mastered by the students. It is

important to evaluate the quality of each one of

the produced songs.

3. Overall Sound Production - 20% of the grade. In

this third criterion we evaluate the soundscape,

i.e. the SFX and Songs together with the game

context. It is important that the sound production

as a whole has quality.

The phase 2 evaluation rubric, which includes the

review of sound effects and music production, is de-

tailed as follows. Table 5 presents the evaluation

Criterion (C) on the ﬁrst column, and the necessary

requirements for the student to be evaluated as Au-

tonomous, Capable, Apprentice or Under Develop-

ment (other columns, from the second to the ﬁfth).

The student gradually advances in learning, com-

pleting steps that will naturally enable them to take

part in the second phase assessment. The novelty of

this evaluation moment are the 3 songs the student

developed during the second phase classes (menu,

gameplay, game over). The student is considered Au-

tonomous if, at the end of the second phase, they fully

produce the sound effects and music, according to the

established criteria, safeguarding the quality of mix-

ing and mastering and the soundscape. Similarly, Ta-

ble 5 presents criteria for determining whether the stu-

dent is Capable, Apprentice or Under Development.

At this point, the teacher has all the sounds and music

separately in order to thoroughly evaluate the produc-

tions of each student.

4 METHODOLOGY

The main objective of this research is to analyze the

effectiveness of using PSG as a tool to support the

teaching of introductory game audio subjects to un-

dergraduate students of a digital games development

course. In order to answer this question, it is impor-

tant to evaluate the data from the students from classes

without and with the use of PSG.

It should be noted that for the purpose of this

analysis, we retrieved the evaluation data of 4 (four)

classes prior to using the PSG. At the same time, we

tabulated data from another 4 (four) classes that used

the PSG as a basis for learning during the years 2020

and 2021. Also, we want to emphasize that the 8

(eight) offerings of the module had the same learning

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Table 5: Assessment rubric.

Criterion

(C)

AUTONOMOUS (AU) CAPABLE (CP) APPRENTICE (AP) UNDER DEVELOP-

MENT (UD)

1 The sound effects, in

their completeness, have

been edited and pro-

cessed properly in accor-

dance with the exposed

requirements. Previous

feedbacks were taken on

consideration or justi-

ﬁed.

The sound effects, in

their completeness, were

edited and processed

properly according to the

exposed requirements.

Previous feedbacks were

neither taken on consid-

eration nor justiﬁed.

The sound effects, (at

least 50%), have been

edited and processed

properly in accordance

with the requirements.

Previous feedbacks were

neither taken on consid-

eration nor justiﬁed.

The sound effects, (less

than 50%), were edited

and processed properly

in accordance with the

exposed requirements.

The checkpoint has

not been made, is not

complete or does not

fully reﬂect what was

requested.

2 The songs, in their en-

tirety, were created prop-

erly in accordance with

the requirements. Care

was taken in relation to

the peculiar characteris-

tics of each one (menu,

game play, game fully

construction.

The songs, partially,

were created properly

according to the exposed

requirements. Despite

all of them having been

developed, there was

integral care regarding

their characteristics.

The songs, partially,

were created properly

according to the exposed

requirements. Of all the

planned ones, one was

not developed.

The songs, partially,

were created properly

according to the exposed

requirements. Of all the

predicted two or three

were not developed.

3 The complete sound

(including all sounds

and music), when

demonstrated in the

game presents accurate

mixing quality, allowing

all sounds and music to

be audible and to match

each other.

Full sound (including all

sounds and music) when

demonstrated in-game

features partial mix

quality. A maximum of

2 sound effects and/or 1

song have the problem of

sounding different from

what the sound actually

is, or at a very different

volume from the rest.

Full sound (including

all sounds and music)

when demonstrated

in-game features partial

mix quality. From 2 to

5 sound effects and/or 1

song have the problem of

sounding different from

what the sound actually

is, or at a very different

volume from the rest.

Full sound (including all

sounds and music) when

demonstrated in-game

features partial mix

quality. More than 5

sound effects and more

than 1 song have the

problem of sounding

different from what the

sound actually is, or at

a very different volume

from the rest.

objectives and were taught by the same teacher. The

main pedagogical difference between them was the

use of the PSG. For this purpose, the game template

was incorporated as a tool in some classes in order

to carry out this analysis. As an immediate beneﬁt,

students were able to perform tasks using this support

tool. Table 6 details student tasks using PSG during

the whole process.

In each week or sequence of weeks the student

uses the PSG (or their own game) for some speciﬁc

purpose, related to the current study topic. The ex-

ceptions are weeks 9 or 18, when the student re-

ceives feedback and is evaluated by the teacher. As

presented in the previous section, the project is di-

vided into two phases. Phase 1 coincides with the

ﬁrst 9 weeks, differing only by the use of PSG. It is

important to emphasize the cyclical characteristic of

this process: the student gradually creates sounds and

tests them on the PSG. From there, it goes through

frequent feedback that makes it go back to creating,

editing and processing the sounds again until the ﬁrst

version of the library is produced (culminating with

the end of phase 1).The teacher of the module will

then evaluate all the submitted sound packages. The

idea is for the teacher to perceive the presence of all

the required sound effects, and whether or not they

were edited and processed according to the estab-

lished criteria, with a reﬁned mixing quality.

Phase 2 coincides with music production. Here

again, the cyclical and facilitating aspect of the game

is important: as the students produce new music and

correct sound effects, they test immediately in the

game and can immediately see the results, allowing

them to make new revisions until producing the ﬁnal

result. Besides, the teacher will be able to test all the

sounds and music, together, directly in the game. For

the teacher in this area, this feature is essential and

facilitates their work, allowing them to listen to the

student’s soundscape while covering the entire route

provided for in the game.

For the classes with students without PSG, it

should be noted that the process is the same, but the

students also had to develop their own games. There-

fore, if they had any issues with their own game de-

velopment, this would reﬂect on the time they had to

work on their game audio library. Method section,

Teaching Introductory Game Audio to Undergraduate Students Using a Novel Digital Game Template

183

Table 6: Student´s tasks using PSG.

Class(es) Student´s Tasks using PSG Study Topics

01 Students play the game to identify all the sounds that

exist in PSG. They elaborate a list of all the sounds in

the game and the events that trigger them.

Introduction to Sound Production.

02-08 Students develop their own SFXs. They use PSG to

receive immediate tests of the SFX soundscape. Stu-

dents receive feedback about their SFXs. (Week 9 is for

teacher’s feedback).

Introduction to Sound Production.

10-15 Students make adjustments in their SFXs and test them

in PSG. They also develop their own music. Students

test each soundtrack in different moments of the game

(without the SFXs they created before).

Introduction to Sound Production.

Introduction to Music Production.

16-17 Students test the SFX+music soundscape. (Week 18 is

for teacher´s feedback and evaluation).

Introduction to Sound Production.

Introduction to Music Production.

concerning Participants, Materials, Design and Proce-

dure inspired by (Christensen et al., 2015) is detailed

as follows.

4.1 Participants

Participants in this study included 248 undergraduate

students from the Digital Games from our University.

Participants included 40 females and 208 males. This

study is based on their evaluation during the offering

of a module of introduction to Digital Game Audio.

The module occurs once a year for two classes. In

total 8 classes were evaluated. Students’ privacy is

ensured as the study is based on the analysis of their

grades in different criteria.

4.2 Materials

During the 8 module offerings, student grades were

catalogued. For each student there is a grade for each

criterion (totaling 3 grades) and a ﬁnal average for the

subject. The ﬁrst 4 classes did not use PSG. The last

4 used. A complete compilation of these data was

carried out by separating them into two groups.

4.3 Design and Procedure

The variables of this study are 3 grades of different

evaluation criteria and the weighted average of each

student. Students are divided into two groups (those

who did not use PSG and those who used PSG). In

order to know if there was a signiﬁcant variation in

the students’ averages without and with the use of the

software, we applied a method of analysis of variance

One way – ANOVA and chi-square test on the vari-

ables involved(Miller, 1997)(S¸ahin and Aybek, 2020).

5 RESULTS

In this section we are interested in answering the fol-

lowing research question: What is the effectiveness

of using PSG as a tool to support the teaching of in-

troductory game audio subjects to undergraduate stu-

dents?

We will break our analysis into three parts. In the

ﬁrst analysis we will look at the overall results by con-

sidering the amount of passing and failing students. In

the second part we will provide a detailed evaluation

by analyzing the different learning evaluation crite-

ria presented in Section 3.4. In the third part we will

present a detailed statistical data analysis.

5.1 Overall Evaluation of PSG

In our ﬁrst analysis, we will refer to the data pre-

sented in Table 7 which contains information about

the class offering (including the year), whether or not

PSG was used with that class, the number of student

enrolled in the class, the number of approved students,

the number of not approved students and the average

ﬁnal mark for each class based on the individual eval-

uation of each student in a scale from 0 to 10, being

0 the worst possible grade and 10 the best possible

grade.

In total 150 students were evaluated without PSG

and 98 students were evaluated using PSG. The anal-

ysis of Table 7 shows some interesting results. First,

is that we can see an improvement of the mean over-

all scores of the classes without and with PSG. If we

take into account the average values from the group-

ing of the classes without and with PSG, we can see

an improvement from 8.30 without PSG to 9.01 with

PSG. Second, we can also observe a reduction in the

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Table 7: Comparision between classes.

Classes Used

PSG

Number of

Students

Approved

Students

Not Approved

Students

Overall

score

1) 2018 - Day NO 32 28 4 7.97

2) 2018 - Night NO 24 21 3 8.13

3) 2019 - Day NO 55 52 3 9.06

4) 2019 - Night NO 39 32 7 7.60

5) 2020 - Day YES 38 35 3 8.84

6) 2020 - Night YES 18 18 0 9.00

7) 2021 - Day YES 35 34 1 9.06

8) 2021 - Night YES 7 7 0 9.66

number of failing students in the classes which used

PSG. In total the number of students who failed the

module that did not use PSG was 17, while the num-

ber of students who failed the module using PSG was

It is important to note that, due to the natural oscil-

lation between the number of students present in each

class, the number of students evaluated decreased be-

tween the ﬁrst 4 classes and the last 4 (from 150 to

98). This is not a speciﬁc issue of the discipline: there

is a natural drop in newcomers to the course in ques-

tion in recent years, furthermore, if we were to evalu-

ate the dropout rates using percentage of students in-

stead of the absolute number we would reach a similar

conclusion, i.e. that using PSG reduces the number of

failing students. However, one might ask, in which

subjects does PSG improve student learning, and that

is precisely the reasoning behind our second analysis,

where we provide an in-depth evaluation and compar-

ison of the different classes.

5.2 In Depth Analysis of PSG

In our second analysis, we will refer to the data pre-

sented in Table 8 which contains detailed informa-

tion about the different class offerings with respect

to the different evaluation criteria presented in Sec-

tion 3.4. On the remainder of this section when we

mention, for example, Class #1 - Criterion 1, we are

referring to all the students in the 2018 – Day class

and their respective achievements with regard to cri-

terion 1 (Sound Effects Production (editing and pro-

cessing)). For each criterion, we also present the num-

ber of students according to the category assigned af-

ter the evaluation of their submitted work. The cate-

gories are Autonomous (AU), Capable (CP), Appren-

tice (AP) and Under Development (UD) and the eval-

uation process for each criterion was previously pre-

sented in Section 3.4.

The data analysis corresponding to the 8 mod-

ules offered brought detailed information about the

use of the PSG software to support the introductory

teaching of Game Audio. During 2018 and 2019, 4

(a) Criterion 1 - SFX Production.

(b) Criterion 2 - Music Production.

Figure 5: Comparative analysis between classes by criteria.

(four) classes attended the subject in question. These

4 classes did not have the experience of using the soft-

ware. The next 4 classes of the years 2020 and 2021

used the software. Based on the analysis of Table 8

Teaching Introductory Game Audio to Undergraduate Students Using a Novel Digital Game Template

185

Table 8: Student’s grouping by criteria per module offering without and with PSG.

Without PSG

Class #1 Class #2 Class #3 Class #4

Criterion 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3

Autonomous (AU) 13 17 17 16 7 9 52 52 37 28 24 23

Capable (CP) 5 15 11 6 17 12 0 0 15 4 8 9

Apprentice (AP) 11 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0

Under Development (UD) 3 0 4 2 0 2 3 3 3 7 7 7

Total students 32 24 55 39

With PSG

Class #5 Class #6 Class #7 Class #8

Criterion 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3

Autonomous (AU) 28 20 33 12 11 14 21 32 22 6 7 6

Capable (CP) 7 14 1 6 5 4 7 2 7 0 0 0

Apprentice (AP) 3 4 4 0 2 0 7 1 6 1 0 1

Under Development (UD) 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Total students 39 38 18 7

and Figure 5 some evidence of learning improved by

using the PSG appeared and can be summarized in the

following points:

1. The average of students in the category Au-

tonomous generally grew. Considering the criteria

separately, the following can be observed:

(a) Autonomous in criterion 1 went from 72.7% to

68.4%.

(b) Autonomous in criterion 2 went from 66.7% to

71.4%

76.5%

Based on these values, the growth of students in

this criterion, went from 65.50% (computed as

the average between 72.7%, 66.7% and 57.3%)

to 72.10% (computed as average between 68.4%,

71.4% and 76.5%).

2. The category Under Development practically dis-

appeared. This result is highly relevant since it

means that the group of students that were likely

to struggle with the class topics and being in risk

of failing the class had an improved learning ex-

perience and were able to perform better.

3. The overall average of students in the category

Apprentice grew from 2.66% (average between

7.30%, 0,00% and 0,07%) to 9.88% (average be-

tween 11,20% 7,10% and 11,20%). In our analy-

sis, this is due to the rise of students Under Devel-

opment to the other categories.

4. The overall average of students in the cate-

gory Capable decreased slightly from 22.66%

(10,00%, 26,70% and 31,30%) to 18% (20,40%,

21,40% and 12,20%). In our analysis, this is due

to the redistribution of students into the categories

Autonomous and Apprentice.

5. In particular, the average number of students Au-

tonomous in criterion 3 (Overall Sound Produc-

tion) grew (from 57.3% to 76.5%). Our analy-

sis on this item is that PSG gave students greater

independence to be able to mix their sounds and

music in an easier way in the game, which al-

lowed them to produce better results in this regard

in comparison with students that did not use PSG.

We believe that this is greatly in part due to the

PSG giving the students an authentic environment

to make the ﬁnal production, since it allows them

to perceive and tune the audio parameters for the

different moments in the game. For example, the

volumes of the footsteps, the rain and the shoot-

ing with regard to each other as well as with the

volume of the background song.

5.3 Statistical Data Analysis

The comparison of the averages of the scores in each

criterion and in the overall grade was performed using

ANOVA (S¸ahin and Aybek, 2020). As detailed in sec-

tion III, our three assessment criteria (C1, C2 and C3)

constitute a student’s overall grade G that is formed

on the basis of 40%, 40%, 20% weighting. Even so,

for the purposes of analysis, we have scores from 0

to 10 for each criterion. Table 9 details the mean and

deviation for each of these data:

Knowing that the calculation of each criterion is

independent of each other, we ran different tests con-

sidering the group (with or without PSG) as an in-

dependent variable and criterion as a dependent vari-

able. Levene’s test (Glass, 1966) was applied to ver-

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186

Table 9: Means and overall grade.

PSG C1 (SFX Pro-

duction)

C2 (Music

Production)

C3 (Overall

Sound Pro-

duction)

G (Student

Overall

Grade)

Mean NO 8.31 8.41 8.07 8.30

YES 8.92 9.03 9.13 9.01

Std Dev NO 2.89 2.58 3.00 2.63

YES 1.63 1.73 1.70 1.32

Table 10: Homogeneity of Variances Tests (Levene’s).

F df1 df2 p

C1 11.02 1 246 0.001

C2 6.21 1 246 0.013

C3 8.24 1 246 0.004

Grade 14.63 1 246 <.001

ify whether or not there was homogeneity of variance.

The results of the test are presented in Table 10. Addi-

tionally, and following the same reasoning, a qualita-

tive analysis using the chi-square test was performed

according to the classiﬁcation in each criterion that

varies according to the categories Autonomous (AU),

Capable (CP), Apprentice (AP) and Under Develop-

ment (UD) comparing students by using or not using

the software. The results are presented in graphical

form in Figure 6. For all cases, a value of p = 0.05 was

used. The chi-square test results for the categories and

respective values were: C1=0.00; C2=0.00; C3=0.00

and Grade=0.01. This result reinforces our hypothesis

that there was a statistically signiﬁcant difference for

the groups (with or without PSG) and that supports

the comparative presentation of the data presented in

Section 5.2.

6 THREATS TO VALIDITY

The possible threats to the validity of this research are

the following.

a) COVID-19 Pandemic. This research was par-

tially developed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

When the pandemic hit we had roughly one week

to transition between in person classes to remote

emergency teaching. We describe more details

about this transition in our game development un-

dergraduate course in a previously published pa-

per (Moro et al., 2021). Therefore, having the

PSG available was very helpful for our remote

classes, even though it was originally designed

to be used in the in-person classes. Even un-

der the emergency remote teaching the students

were able to perform better than in the previous

classes that did not use PSG. In that sense, hav-

ing a speciﬁc game context where they focus on

developing only the game audio artefacts might

have helped more than usual.

b) Using PSG vs. Developing their own Games. One

aspect that is important to recall is that usually our

traditional approach teaching introductory game

audio is to make the students develop their own

games (for other classes that they are taking in

parallel) and then use that same game for them

to create the game audio assets. In our experi-

ence, the students will have the whole course to

create the game audio assets for their games, and

normally most of them ﬁnd it very challenging to

create their game and to also produce the game au-

dio assets. Therefore, for introductory game audio

classes, we believe that PSG is very helpful as it

allows the students to focus only on the game au-

dio related tasks and assignments. Furthermore,

as soon as the students ﬁnish working on their

game audio, they can readily test it with context,

which helps them to perceive if their game audio

assets are working as intended or if they should

still work on it. This might be the main reason

why students in the classes where PSG was used

obtained better scores on average than those in the

classes without PSG.

c) User-Bias. It should be noted that the main users

of PSG are also their developers. Therefore there

might be some usability issues when used by

other educators worldwide but we will gladly as-

sist other educators who are willing to use PSG in

their introductory game audio classes.

7 CONCLUSION

Game Audio plays an important role in the digital

games industry, however there are very few papers

that address initiatives about the challenges of teach-

ing game audio or that propose and validate novel

approaches for teaching game audio. In this paper

we have presented and evaluated the PUCPR Sound

Game, which is a freely available digital game tem-

plate developed in Unity, that supports the teaching

Teaching Introductory Game Audio to Undergraduate Students Using a Novel Digital Game Template

187

(a) Statistical Results for Cri-

terion 1 - SFX Production.

(b) Statistical Results for Cri-

terion 2 - Music Production.

rion 3 - Overall Sound Production.

(d) Statistical Results for Overall Grades.

Figure 6: Statistical Results.

and learning process for introductory game audio as

the students are able to focus on the production of

different game audio artefacts. Furthermore, the stu-

dents can use any music production tools and do not

need to understand unity to load their developed game

audio artefacts in the game.

In order to gauge the beneﬁts of using PSG in the

classroom, we have performed an analysis of 8 dif-

ferent offerings of the introductory game audio mod-

ule (4 without and 4 with PSG) in the Digital Games

Development undergraduate course at our university.

The evaluation processes across all offerings of the

module is based on a speciﬁc rubric for the different

game audio artefacts. In total three sets of game audio

artefacts are evaluated: Sound Effects (SFX) Produc-

tions; Music Production; and Overall Sound Produc-

tions. Grades are assigned to all classes based on this

rubric and depending on the student grade they are

classiﬁed among one of four different groups. Based

on the analysis of the results of the grades obtained by

the students across the different offerings of the mod-

ules, it has become clear that students who had access

to PSG were able to achieve better grades, as there

were in learning, making students more autonomous

and also drastically reducing the number of students

who were practically unable to develop almost any-

thing of the subject. This evidence was reinforced

considering the increase in the mean overall score of

the students and the decrease in the failure rates.

As future research direction we plan to continue to

improve PSG in order to add new functionalities for

educators and students:

• New Phases. Currently the software has a single

scenario. With planning, it is possible to develop

different scenarios taking into account gradual de-

grees of difﬁculty from what is expected to be ex-

plored from the point of view of sound learning.

• Report Mode. It would allow the teacher to re-

ceive a closure on the student’s actions (with their

permission) facilitating the evaluation process.

• Sound Exploration Mode. would let students to

experiment with different sounds developed by

other students. This could include good and bad

sound designs to enable the students to experi-

mentally understand these concepts.

• Additional Game Genres. the current version of

PSG contains only one game loop. It will be in-

teresting to create more game loops with differ-

ent themes and eventually allow students to cus-

tomize their games on other aspects such as the

aesthetics of the game.

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188

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors thank the support from PUCPR, CAPES

and CNPq.

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