How a university coding competition develops future skills

In a typical university, a computer science student and a fine arts student might go four years without ever speaking. Yet they may eventually end up working together once they graduate. University course structures often fail to teach the cross-departmental communication that these students will need in the workplace, which makes it important to find ways to break down the silos that separate academic departments. 

Experiential learning can help bring students together to apply theoretical knowledge and create a shared output. One method that has proved effective for us is to run short, high-intensity game design sprints, or coding competitions, called game jams. These are high-energy events during which students from a range of disciplines, such as computer science and art, work together to build a functional video game from scratch within a very short time frame (usually 48 to 72 hours). Game jams provide a “pressure cooker” environment that forces rapid problem-solving and collaboration. By stripping away the need for perfection, they allow students and professionals alike to experiment with wild ideas, learn new tools quickly and build a tight-knit community through shared, intense and creative struggle.

The shared struggle and the final showcase create a strong peer-to-peer support network that extends far beyond the event and helps create a sense of belonging, which increases student retention and academic success. 

Structuring for true interdisciplinary collaboration

To create meaningful interdisciplinary learning, educators must position a game jam as a creative problem-solving weekend, rather than a coding competition. This subtle shift in language invites humanities, business, and music students who might otherwise assume they lack technical expertise, to take part. Require every group to recruit specific roles, such as story designer, project lead, audio engineer and programmer, so that they know what to focus on. Giving students physical or digital role badges helps students articulate their specific contributions from the start.

Spend the first 30 minutes guiding teams through a jargon-busting exercise. This involves asking students to define key terms from their respective fields and establish a shared working vocabulary before the work begins.

Teaching agility: a key skill in modern workplaces

Textbooks explain project management, but tight deadlines force students to execute tasks under pressure. The most valuable learning moment during a short sprint occurs when a team realise their ambitious design is unsustainable and unceremoniously cuts a much-loved feature, a skill known as “killing your darlings”. This is an important part of agile scoping, the process of continuously adjusting and trimming a project’s feature list to produce a working product by a deadline, even if it means cutting non-essential ideas along the way.

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Halfway through the event, include a mandatory faculty checkpoint. This requires teams to present their core gameplay loop (which includes the conditions for winning and losing, end game events, awards, obstacles and ability to replay the games) and cut 30 per cent of their planned secondary features. By maintaining a shared document where they record every feature they cut, the reason for the cut, and how they adapted their workflow, students can turn apparent crises into evidence of agile scoping.

Rethinking assessment: process over product

Grading work solely based on the final prototype reduces creative risk-taking by encouraging students to play it safe. To deliver authentic assessment, educators and facilitators should focus on the collaborative process rather than the product. Allocating most assessment marks to an individual reflective report helps us assess the individual outcomes. You could ask students to analyse project bottlenecks, team communication dynamics and key failure points. Have students evaluate peers on reliability, communication and mutual support to provide a more accurate picture of each member’s performance. 

Overcoming implementation hurdles with ‘micro jams’

Naturally, a 48-hour overnight event poses risks to security, well-being, and venue access. A game jam can be condensed into a six- to eight-hour daytime sprint and still achieve the same pedagogical outcomes. A single-day schedule eliminates logistical hurdles while preserving the pressure cooker experience to stimulate rapid problem-solving. Partners across two or three departments can split room booking, catering and mentoring duties. 

Game jams must evolve from novel extracurriculars into permanent interdisciplinary labs. They allow educators to evaluate the messy, reflective journey of creation rather than the finished product, equipping graduates with the interdisciplinary fluency and adaptability that modern careers demand.

Oğuz Şentürk is head of department digital game design (English) at Istanbul Aydın University, Turkey.