June Academy/summer Gaming II

Today is the first day of the June Academy. I am excited to see what new things are in store for Year 3! On the summer Gaming II front, I have finished teaching all the topics up to Testing and Debugging. Now, the students have an extensive code library created based on all the topics we have covered. I hope this will help them be more adequately prepared to continue their game ideas to completion.

Blogroll

I think that blogrolls are cool ideas. They have the newest and most updated blogs at the top.

a new approach

Going into this Gaming II course, I plan to try a new approach. I plan to have a conference with each student. I want to make sure during this meeting that I discuss with the student which game development topics that I feel that are important to their game, the timeline in which the student expects to complete said topics, and the timeline for their completed game demo. Based on all this information, I want to be able to draw up an informal contract that the students can put on their wikis. I want students to stick to their schedules, or at least know what the schedule is. It needs to be more than instant gratification, there needs to be more planning. Hopefully this will get students to hold themselves more accountable for breaking timelines.

Spring classes are over, bring on the summer class!

Spring classes, and presentations, are over. Monday starts the summer session of Gaming II. I plan to tweak my syllabus this weekend to implement some changes to the way I do deadlines/grades in Gaming II. I plan to create a way that students are force to do at least three different project deliverables. Maybe one around 4 weeks in, the second around 8 weeks, and the last at 12 weeks. This will help deter the rampant procrastination that I saw during my Gaming I and Gaming II presentations this spring. Or, at least I hope it does.

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?