Lessons from COSMOS: Four Years of Iteration on a Game Design Class

In this paper, we describe a video game design and programming class offered as part of the California Summer School for Mathematics and Science (COSMOS) program at University of California, Santa Cruz. The authors have co-taught this class for four years, and have had an opportunity to iteratively explore a number of approaches in teaching the class. The course has evolved a great deal over the last four years; this paper presents a post-mortem of the program so far, describing our different approaches, our successes and failures, insight into the game design process for students, and recommendations for future game design courses.