The starting of Paper Prototypes

Yesterday officially started the beginning of Paper Prototypes in Josh's Gaming I class. Some students have yet to come up with a finalized game idea, but I feel they will solidify they ideas soon. In the meantime, I invite everyone to watch the following YouTube video for inspiration!

One of my many memorable games

Before 950 different versions of Worms on the market, there was just plain old Worms on PC. This game, whose premise seems silly at best, is much more than what is shown on the surface.
Worms put you in a situation where you have 4 playable characters, that happen to be worms, on your team versus an opposing team of 4 worms. The object of the game is to use the varied arsenal of weapons at your disposal to kill the opposing team before they kill you.
This was one of the first games that I had an interest in "modding" or modifying or adapting my own content to.


With this game, you could create your own player maps and add your own .WAV sounds to add different voices to your worms. There was definitely a skill factor involved when using certain weapons that were affected by wind in the game. Overall, I have very fond memories of Worms. I am already wondering when I left my install disc...

First posted flash FLA/SWF - end of 4th week of class

Wednesday signified the end of the 4th week of class. That class was the culmination of the students Mini Game project. The students learned the skills of publishing and posting their FLA and SWF files to the wiki. Several of the students went the extra mile and embellished their games. Some fantastic examples of student work can be found here at KraZy's page and Bagh Nakh Kora's file. These students went above and beyond adding some self-learned skills such as poisoned carrots (which caused negative points), timers, and rabbits moved in all four directions. I can see that this semester has some fantastic potential!

Mini Game Project

Today I finished leading MCTC's Fall 09 Gaming I students through the Mini Game Project. I am Josh's support educator, so typically I try to add expertise where required. Last Wednesday and today though I temporarily put on my Lead Educator hat and led the students through the mini game. I hope leading this session allows our students to see that both Josh and I are there to support them with our expertise.

And so it begins again...

Fall semester has official started at MCTC. This semester is a bit different in that Josh Joseph is teaching a gaming class this semester, and I am his support educator. I am not the lead educator because I am teaching 25 hours (8 classes) in a different area of focus than gaming this semester. I have been sitting in on Josh's classes so far to make sure that the students get off to a fantastic start and everything has been going perfect. This has been a new experience for me, sitting back and watching someone else teach the classes I have taught for two years. I hope to lend my experience and expertise to Josh and his students to make their first class a success.

My memorable learning experience...

As a child, if you asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I would not have said a professor. I always had the ambition to become a carpenter and architect. My goal was to create the blueprints AND build the house. Even though my mother has been a teacher as long as I can remember, it never occurred to me as a possible career. So how did I get here? Well, as I discovered computers I decided to shift my career focus towards computers, but it still wasn't teaching computers. It wasn't until 2001 that teaching became a possibility in my mind. I was taking a Microsoft class that I found very interesting. One day, the instructor was verbally quizzing me and my fellow students about the reading assignment from the previous night. The rest of the class fell silent, I seemed to be the only answering the questions because apparently I was the only one that read my overnight assignment. After the instructor chastised the rest of the class for not doing their assignment, he sarcastically asked, "Since you seem to the only person to have read the chapter last night, do you want teach these idiots what they missed?" I agreed. For the next hour, I talked about the concepts and terms from that overnight assignment. I didn't feel like I was being put on the spot. I felt that I was able to talk about a subject that I found very exciting and hopeful foster excitement in the other students. Looking back, I feel that if I hadn't attended that class on that very night, I may have never had that learning experience, caught the teaching bug, and never loved a job as much as I do this one.

Day 1 Overnight assignment

I created two blogrolls tonight. First, I decided to create a blogroll of my current Gaming class students, my summer Gaming II class. It was super easy because I already had all of my student's blogs in Google Reader, and I was able to import all of them with one simple click (see it is even MORE helpful Jeremy!). I also created a blogroll on two of my favorite sites to visit. Since I am a techie, I live at slashdot.org, so it made perfect sense to link it. Also, since I am photography nut, I also check dpreview.com religiously. Both of these sites have feeds that I check everyday and highly value, and maybe viewers of my blog will find them valuable as well.