Preparing college students for a knowledge-based economy is a challenge that requires curriculum design that puts more emphasis on learning skills than on content to be taught. Cognitive skills should be practiced in a context of some content, but the choice of content, the choice of the learning environment, and the choice of the assessment procedures can enhance the development of such skills. In this paper we present these choices for a course that was specially designed to provide a motivating and engaging context that requires the use of higher order cognitive skills. The title of the course is “Design of computer-based games and interactive stories” and it is provided to students with no prior exposure to computer programming. At the end of the course students are required to submit an interactive artifact (a game or a story) implemented in Scratch, which is a visual programming environment. In this qualitative study we present the results from a thematic analysis of students’ post-course reflection reports.