Be a computer scientist for a week the McGill “game programming guru” Summer Camp

Motivating high school students to consider Computer Science as their future field of study at the university level is a challenging endeavor. This paper describes the McGill Computer Science Summer Camp targeted at high school students from grade 10 to 11 (ages 15 to 17). We first motivate our choice of using computer games as the main camp theme, and then present the teaching methodology used throughout the camp. A day-by-day breakdown of the camp is provided, as to better illustrate the distribution of the material throughout the week and the evaluation methods used to track the progress of the students. We also present the game environment we developed in which the students exercise their problem solving skills during the lab sessions. We conclude by illustrating the positive effect of the camp, using a combination of code analysis and evaluation questionnaire filled out by the students and their parents.