  Due to their pedagogical advantages, large final projects in information
visualization courses have become standard practice. Students take on a
client--real or simulated--a dataset, and a vague set of goals to create a
complete visualization or visual analytics product. Unfortunately, many
projects suffer from ambiguous goals, over or under-constrained client
expectations, and data constraints that have students spending their time on
non-visualization problems (e.g., data cleaning). These are important skills,
but are often secondary course objectives, and unforeseen problems can majorly
hinder students. We created an alternative for our information visualization
course: Roboviz, a real-time game for students to play by building a
visualization-focused interface. By designing the game mechanics around four
different data types, the project allows students to create a wide array of
interactive visualizations. Student teams play against their classmates with
the objective to collect the most (good) robots. The flexibility of the
strategies encourages variability, a range of approaches, and solving wicked
design constraints. We describe the construction of this game and report on
student projects over two years. We further show how the game mechanics can be
extended or adapted to other game-based projects.
