Fabrik is a visual programming environment -a kit of computational and user-interface components that can be "wired" together to build new components and useful applications. Fabrik diagrams utilize bidirectional dataflow connections as a shorthand for multiple paths of flow. Built on object-oriented foundations, Fabrik components can compute arbitrary objects as outputs. Music and animation can be programmed in this way and the user interface can even be extended by generating graphical structures that depend on other data. An interactive type system guards against meaningless connections. As with simple dataflow, each Fabrik component can be compiled into an object with access methods corresponding to each of the possible paths of data propagation.

We have designed and implemented game-themed programming assignment modules targeted specifically for adoption in existing introductory programming classes. These assignments are self-contained, so that faculty members with no background in graphics or gaming can selectively pick and choose a subset to combine with their own assignments in existing classes. This paper begins with a survey of previous results. Based on this survey, the paper summarizes the important considerations when designing materials for selective adoption. The paper then describes our design, implementation, and assessment efforts. Our result is a road map that guides faculty members in experimenting with gamethemed programming assignments by incrementally adopting/customizing suitable materials for their classes.