Game Design and Computer Programming in the General Education Classroom

In Fall 2011, we taught a course entitled “Writing and the Electronic Literary,” an English course that fulfills a University of Wisconsin-Madison general education requirement. The course included a project in which students, most of whom had never written a computer program, used the Inform7 design system to build works of Interactive Fiction (IF). In this presentation, we briefly describe our approach to teaching the course and make a two-fold argument: 1) the general education classroom offers a useful space in which students can connect the practice of writing with the practice of computer programming; 2) games are the ideal medium by which we can help students to make that connection.