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.

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!