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.

Hindsight

This semester is almost over, and I already know many things that I plan on changing in my syllabus for next semester. Attendance will be mandatory, grades will be taken more often, and if I have to "go hunting" for student assignments on the wiki, their will be points deducted. We are to treat our syllabii as pseudo-contracts with our students, laying out what is expected of them, and what they should expect of me. I have hesitated to enforce their new rules because I didn't have them on my syllabus this semester, but next semester they will definitely be on it. I am totally ecstatic about next semester because I checked my numbers on Friday, and I currently have 23 students enrolled!

Almost there...

The last two weeks have been a whirlwind. When I got back from Salt Lake City, my students started working on the Adding Sound topic. During the same week we talked about Adding Interaction. I did a lecture on Adding Interaction where I talked about some of the code issues that may arise in Gaming II. I like to let my students see some advanced Flash every once in a while because I feel it helps hold their interest and excitement. This week we start the Assembling the Game topic.

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.