Games in the Classroom Position Paper at Oopsla'99 Workshop #2; Quest for Eeective Classroom Examples the Advantages of Using (computer) Games in the Classroom

Computer Games have grown in only two decades from a curiosity to a major Industry. They ooer to the Computer Science Educator more potential than only being a source of distraction for the students: they provide us with interesting examples of Universa of Discourse, which can be turned into information models. Over the past years the author has used these games, in particular Sid Meier's Civilization II 1 , in his courses on Information System Modeling. In this position paper I will discuss some of the experiences obtained. Over the past decades several generation of Computer Science and information System students have been trained in the Database Field by working on Chris Date's Universe of Discourse describing the enterprise model of employees, managers, projects and departments citeda95. It is an extremely dull example which moreover gives a false feeling of simplicity. We know today that the enterprise world is much better described by Scott Adams in his Dilbert Comics 1]. Alternative examples like libraries, schools and hospitals suuer from the same weaknesses: they are uninspiring and overly simple. In order to make them more interesting the model has to be made more complex, but that doesn't necessarily leads to a more inspiring example. Instead I have advocated and used in my own courses over the past years the universa of discourse which can be found in the various strategy games available for computers or otherwise. Think of games like Warcraft II, SimCity2000, Civilization II, Heroes of Might and Magic III, etc.. . 2 The common theme among such games is that the (human) player has to manage \his/hers" tribe, city or civilization over the course of a longer or shorter period of time, competing against opponents or just the adverse forces of Nature. Management involves activities like building cities and/or city improvements, populating areas on the map, inventing technology and/or magic, building or training troups and leading them into victorious battles against evil opponents. The various games diier with respect to their modeling background (real history, Phantasy or Science Fiction), and to more relevant features like being turn based (human player and simulated opponents move in turns without any time pressure), or real time (the human player must respond in real time to the opponents, unless the game is paused, but then the game is completely inactive and frequently even unobservable). Many of the games are grid-based, meaning that the …