Salt Lake City

This whole week I am at the League of Innovations's CIT 2008 in Salt Lake City. It is a 5 day meeting of community colleges. I have seen so many wonderful things here and attend many excellent workshops. Camtasia Relay, Wimba, EON Reality, Windows Server 2008 MOC and MOAC textbooks, and podcasting without a mac have been several of the interesting vendors and topics I have attend workshops on while here at CIT 2008. We did a poster session today on IT Certifications in Community College Curricula. We had a very large turn out, with many people interested how we have integrated the MCSA, MCSE, CCNA, A+, and Network+ certifications into our Associate of Applied Science degree at Marshall Community and Technical College. This conference has really energized and reinvigorated my passion for IT. I am thinking about submitting a Call for Proposal for next year's conference in Detroit on our Animation and Game Developer option and how we have used MyGLife to teach our students Web 2.0 skills and important incidental skills through game design.

Drawing With Flash

Today I showed my students several of the annoyances that a beginner in flash would run into. I showed them how to Group their drawings and told them to do this often. I even re-iterated the fundamental difference between frames and keyframes, a change in content. I finished off by showing a preview of Adding Animation by explaining how to animate with and without a motion guide. I did all of this to prep my students for next week, a week in which I will be gone to Salt Lake City for the Conference on Information Technology. Now my students should be ready to continue drawing in flash and start some early animation if they like.

On to Drawing with Flash...

Class slowed down a little during Paper Prototypes. Schedules, power outages, sickness, and creative block all played their part in the extension to the Paper Prototype topic. Now, my students know what they want to do, and we are pushing towards Drawing in Flash fast. All the topics after Paper Prototype build on your game idea, so it was important to make sure that everyone had a solid idea.

With the extension of Paper Prototypes I have also asked my students to blog on their experience creating their paper prototypes. I especially want to know about their difficulties and how I might be able to run that topic more smoothly in the future.

Paper Prototypes continue...

My class got off to a bit of a slow start on Paper Prototypes. I think this was because I asked them to come up a fantastic game idea one day, and then asked for them to start designing it on paper the next. Sometimes creativity doesn't work on a schedule. Either way, all of my students are now making their paper prototypes, game ideas in hand. So, I figure my initial estimation of two weeks for the paper prototype topic will stretch into three weeks, but if the ideas are solid, being a week late with be well worth it.

Paper Prototypes

Today will be the first official start of Paper Prototypes. Tuesday, the MyGLife website was down, and I took the time to talk one-on-one with each student about their game ideas. Today, many of them should be posting their game ideas to their wiki through the Imagining Your Game topic. I can't wait to read them!

Presentation Rubric

Today my students start on the Imagining your Game topic, and feel this is the perfect time to talk about the Presentation Rubric. Right now when there are about to embark on their own game idea, I can lay out the criteria for what is expected of their presentation. I can't wait to see what they come up with this semester.

Starting the trek...

Well, all of my students now officially have profiles in the Globaloria wiki and blogs. Now that the "paperwork" section is out of the way we can get to the exciting stuff... Game Design!!!