The light at the end of a tunnel ... is just another tunnel that is lit

Ok, well, presentation time is here! For some reason, it seems I am more nervous about this time of year than my students. Some students don't have a care in the world, while others move at a frantic pace. There are even some students that I categorize as "presumed dead", by the fact that all forms of modern communication sent their way seems to get swallowed by a black hole.
So, next week is finals week. Finals week brings the last Gaming I presentation day, and Gaming II's presentation day. After that though, it is not over. The very next week after finals starts my Gaming II summer class, an accelerated version of the normal 16 weeks course.
Here we go!

Progess report 3 and the end of the semester

Our third progress report has been submitted! Yeah! Now comes the task of finishing out spring semester. Since I only have four students in Gaming II, finding a time to do their presentation will be much easier than finding the time to do 26 game presentation for Gaming I. I am a bit worried that I won't schedule enough time to get through all of the presentations. So, my mission is sit down this weekend and hammer out a schedule for the presentations so there will not be any surprises for my students.

Drawing in Flash and CS4

Paper prototypes are now finished, recorded, and posted. That is a heavy weight off my shoulders. Now though, we have started to work in Flash. We have done the Drawing in Flash topic and are getting ready to do Adding Animation/Navigation. This is where the next hurdles begins. The majority of our labs have Flash CS4 on them, and this is going to throw a big wrench into Adding Animation. CS4 has changed everything when it comes to tweening. Oh well. If everything was easy, why would we do it?

Paper prototypes

My Gaming I students have started their paper prototypes. I think that this topic is the core of the first section curriculum. Everything that comes before this topic shapes it, and everything after calls back to it. My classroom is constantly abuzz with students showing their neighbor's their ideas, drawing, ideas, etc. In Gaming II, my students are further tweaking their games using the customized topics from the Game Development section.

Snow, snow, snow!

If there is one think that is certain, besides death and taxes, it is that every few years ice, snow, sleet, cats and dogs (not really) all get dumped on West Virginia. The students love it, but I hate it. Unlike the public schools, there isn't any makeup snow days at Marshall. Classes end on a specific day in May, and if you haven't covered all of your curriculum, then oh well! So, because of this, I feel as though I am playing catch up. My Gaming I students will start the Imagining Your Game topic Wednesday, while my Gaming II students continue to work through the first couple of Gaming Development topics. They are anticipating beginning to learn advanced ActionScript features that they can implement in their games.
Here is to hoping that the weather front rolling this week doesn't bring lots of snow!

Syllabus time!

Monday starts spring semester. It amazes me the amount of academic change that can happen in a single month. My schedule has completely changed with the exception of Gaming I and Gaming II. I finally finished my syllabi for this semester, all 7 of them! I revised my Gaming I syllabus with a couple of old rules and a few new ones as well. First and foremost, the attendance policy is alive and well again. My attrition rate was horrible last semester, and I blame poor attendance not negatively affecting student's grades as a contributing factor. When you miss work enough times, you are either reprimanded or fired. I believe that a similar negative effect should occur if you miss too much class time. We are supposed to be instilling in students ethics that employers are going to expect, and I feel this is a major one. Last semester I had found it frustrating when I had to "hunt down" student work on the wiki, so another revision to my syllabus mentions that work is expected to be organized and posted in the proper section of the student's project page, both SWF and FLA files. If this is not followed, the work will be viewed as incomplete and not graded. For each 24 hour period the work is incomplete, 10 percent will be deducted from the possible final grade for that project. Having 32 students this semester in Gaming I will require organization from everyone, and I wanted to make sure that was understood on Day 1.

It is over...for now.

Thursday was MCTC's Gaming I presentations. It went fabulous. I am a little disappointed with my attrition rate this semester, but I must say, the students that stuck with the class have awesome game ideas. Each student is taking to their games because they are their own. I do like the aspect of team collaboration, but on the other hand, there is something to be said for the love my students have poured into an idea that is truly theirs. I screencasted the presentations so that I can show the students in my spring semester Gaming I class. I believe showing these students up front what Gaming I alumni have accomplished using this new curriculum will help inspire my spring students. It should also give them an idea of the expectations of Gaming I. I am still coping with the idea of how I am going to teach a class of 30+ students. Don't get me wrong, I have taught several different classes in the classroom that we have that holds 32 students, but never have those classes required a thorough presentation at the end of the semester. Usually that room is for our Intro. to Computers classes which give Powerpoint Presentations, but I know that our gaming presentations are much more involved than that. I suppose this is something I will be thinking about when I start Winter break this Tuesday. I will have to turn in my spring syllabii right after the first of the year, so the number of days to schedule for presentations will be one of main topics I will tackle when revamping my Gaming I syllabus for spring.