Teaching graphics for games using Microsoft XNA

We present an approach to teaching introductory computer graphics for game development using Microsoft XNA as a development platform. One of the main challenges for such courses is an uneven level of student knowledge and skills, particularly in the underlying mathematics. In our course, the participants´ background ranged from undergraduates who just completed CS2 to seniors in their last semester. Our course had four individual programming assignments, designed to help with the assimilation of the necessary game development and mathematical concepts by connecting the debugging process with visual feedback. We discuss the topics we covered, pedagogical methods, goals of the assignments, and student feedback for each of the programming assignments.