EnVyMyCar: a multi-player car racing game for teaching computer graphics

The development of a computer game is widely used as a means to convey Computer Sciences concepts. There are several reasons for that: it is stimulates creativity, it provides an immediate sense of achievement when the code works, it typically covers all the aspects of an introductory course, it is easy to find ideas just looking around. In this paper we present NVMC (EnVy My Car), a framework for collaborative/competitive development of a computer game and report the experience in using it in two computer graphics courses held in the year 2007 by the authors. We developed a multiplayer car racing game where the student is only asked to implement the rendering of the scene, while all the other aspects, communication and synchronization are implemented in the framework and transparent to the developer. The novelty of our framework is that all the clients on-line are able to see the views provided by the other clients, which serves to motivate the students to improve their work by comparing it with the other clients, as a means to pick up ideas from the others and finally to show off with their classmates.