From Pong to PlayStation: This Class Uses Gaming to Teach Computer Science

Moshiri plays video games for fun, but he also believes these games have valuable lessons to teach computer science students. Game developers constantly seek ways to make computing more efficient, to reduce latency between player commands and what happens in the game. They also work to optimize game architecture. And of course, they work with graphics processing units, or GPUs, rather than the central processing units, or CPUs, that drive computing in laptop and desktop computers. Today, these GPUs also are at the core of the infrastructure powering machine learning and neural networks. 

“I want to get my students excited about computing in the context of gaming,” Moshiri said. “They need to better understand the tradeoffs we need to make between performance and memory, for example. They need to understand the differences between programming for CPUs and GPUs and why these differences exist.”

To explain some of these concepts – and more – students heard from an impressive list of industry guests. Mike Stopa, academic manager for Sony Interactive Gaming, talked about the Nexus of AI and Gaming. Zhen Zhai, who leads the centralized AI and Machine Learning team at Blizzard Entertainment, spoke about massive, multi-player online role-playing games, commonly known as MMORPGs, such as World of Warcraft. Author and video game historian Aidan Moher spoke about the advent of console gaming in the late 1990s and early 2000s. YouTuber and Digital Foundry founder John Linneman talked about the competition between video game companies for dominance in the game console market, also known as the console wars. 

Most students in the class are freshmen and computer science majors, but a few hail from computer engineering and even history. Many said they chose UC San Diego for its rigorous academics and STEM focus. 

Shreyaan Chhabra, a computer science major, said he chose the class because he likes gaming and heard that Moshiri was a good teacher, kind and approachable. He said he chose UC San Diego because it has a great reputation for computer science. 

Luna Meyers, who has not declared a major yet, said she was surprised at how quickly the video game industry developed. “It’s only been around for a few decades, and it was so primitive not so long ago,” she said. 

Landon Guetzkov, a history major, said he enjoyed hearing guests talk about the history of video games. “I was born in 2007, so I didn’t experience the beginning of the console wars,” he said. 

Moshiri said he plans to offer the class again, and hopes to offer even more video game development courses across campus in the future. “I hope to launch a whole gaming curriculum in the long term,” he said.