Adopting Games Development and Visual Curriculum Design (VCD) Framework for Connected eLearning

Games development offers potentials for both learning or teaching computer science (CS) and programming. It is especially useful as learners are able to see the application of concepts and programming techniques. A games development course itself also adds interest and motivations to the learning process while reducing the learning curve and enhancing knowledge gathering from learners’perspective. From educators’ perspective, games development offers versatility and varieties to modernize traditional CS curriculum. While games development presents multiple bene?ts, learning or teaching the subject is challenging. This is due to an increasing trend of large and complex modern games development tools as well as tools usage that require competencies in using interactive icons and visual scripting systems. The proliferation of information about these tools over the Internet further adds to the challenge of learning and understanding. All these issues increase the challenges to impart required foundational knowledge and skills. This paper addresses these new challenges by introducing the "Visual Curriculum Design" (VCD) framework. Based on the core components, usage of VCD framework is demonstrated and implications for connected eLearning highlighted.