frontwheeldrive.com: rudy rucker revisited Your computer science textbook Software Engineering and Computer Games is coming out from Addison Wesley this fall. Are video games a good way to teach computer science?

IMHO, having students do computer games projects is absolutely the best possible way to teach programming, graphics, software engineering, object oriented programming, etc. I used to be into photography, and I managed to get hold of this very nice camera, a Leica M4. And I was constantly shooting pictures with it. And then I wanted another lens, and I went to a store that carried Leica stuff, and I found out that a lot of people were into collecting Leicas, like keeping them in glass cases. To me, a camera is for taking pictures. And a programming tool like Visual Studio or the JDK is for writing programs. Not for collecting different versions of, or for arguing about, or for comparing to other products. It's there to use. Writing a game is a nice big problem that makes you program a lot.