Sunday, we had to turn in interim grades, and I spent Monday in class reviewing with the students where in the process they were and what they were to have posted to be able to demonstrate to me their progress.

The following were some of the evaluation criteria:

•Was their learning log up to date?

•Was their basic animation completed, tested uploaded to their files page and subsequently placed in their projects page in the Other projects section?

•Were two game evaluations (one for a professionally designed game and one for a student designed game ) posted on the projects page under the Playing to learn section?

•Was their blog updated:

I explained again, how we, as instructors, are to say no to tests and how their work becomes transparent by making it public. I used the example from Bill about the 60 Minutes interview with James Cameron regarding his new movie, Avatar and the collaborative nature of the work in moviemaking.

I hope it continues to sink in—that there really is a rhyme and reason to the public posting of the work and the social nature of collaborating.

Students spent Monday and yesterday pretty much re-examining their work and postings up to this point and hopefully that will continue to be an ongoing thing. Once their buttons are completed and tested, they too are to be uploaded to their projects page.

Time will tell, it usually does.

I missed three days of work last week, but managed to come back Thursday and Friday. We're in the first real cold spell of the fall, and we had our first snow on Saturday. It's been cold all weekend. Winter may finally be on the horizon. 

Wen I came back on Thursda,y we set up our game teams, a total of four teams of 5 students each. We used a random method of team selection so that no group of students could stack their team, or exclude any student from their team. It seemed to work out pretty, each team has from my observation, talent and a range of students. I'm pretty happy about the make up of our teams. They are now meeting to decide on their names and their avatars, and we'll be setting up their wikis. 

Friday, I demonstrated how to program and design working buttons. The students are now working on their own buttons and are to post them on their wikis when they have completed them. 

Two gentlemen from the WV Dept. of Ed. came to visit our school on Friday, the 20th. They came to my class with our Director of Career and Technology. They happened into my Intro to GraphComm class, where the students were working on one of three ongoing assignments; a scanning assignment, a vector based artwork using Illustrator and a pixel based project using photoshop. 

In the course of discussion, the Globaloria Game Design course came up and we had an interesting discussion, about the whole web 2.0 and I immediately put that into the context of some corollary reading for the game design course I've been doing, most recently The Big Shift, Why it Matters by John Hagel III John Seely Brown and Lang Davison. I've read it twice now and will read it again, directly. 

The Big Shift is an eye opening look at emerging factors impacting business, strategies to deal with these emerging trends, (including new media) and how all of these trends and factors relate to business sustainability, innovation, ROI and global competition. It certainly provides come context for our endeavors to use game play and design as a gateway to understanding the new media. 

It was a very interesting conversation with the gentlemen from Charleston and quite an exciting way to end the week. 

I've been pleased the last week or so as I read my students blogs, some of them are starting to utilize the blog concept fairly well. Their comments are introspective, thoughtful, and accurately reflect their perception of the state of success or failure they are experiencing in this course. Some of them are way too harsh on themselves, and I need to post some comments to remind them of what they have learned and how far they have come on this social media path.

As for my learning, I am getting pretty comfortable at wiki coding, mostly by repairing student code and working on my own pages, and am starting to get a feel for which symbol controls what.  I do struggle with the learning methodology, because I haven't yet been able to discover a coding sequence list. By list I mean something that says if you want to start a new line of text this is the symbol you use and this is where you insert it. If you want to double space a line, this is the symbol you use and where you place it. I know what I want to do—finding the code to make it happen is another thing. 

Without a guide your learning mode seems to be limited to looking at a line of existing code, and seeing the end result. Then you go in and change some code, then using preview, you go look at the page to see what was changed. Using that information, you can then infer that your action x caused page result y.

It seems to me much like trying to write a novel in a foreign language with the only reference guide being other novels written in  the foreign language (wiki code) that also have an english version (the visible page). You can look at the foreign version, then compare that to the English version and deduce the meaning. Then  you try to utilize that information to construct a new passage for your book. It can be done and I am doing it, but a dictionary and a grammar book in the language of wiki coding would see to me to be a more efficient way of learning to code. 

I going to start searching for that. If anyone knows of such a reference tool let me know 

Well,  my friends, a new season is upon us; Daylight Savings Time is gone, Halloween, over and we are in the deep fall of the year. The wollybears are nestling in for the winner, the last of the flowers, the tomatoes and the leaves of our Maples, are all gone, fallen to the frost and the shortening days.  

I love the melancholy smell of fall, rife with the lost promise of summer, yet laden with the advent of the season to come, of wood fires in the back room, and late season camping trips, of Christmas and the deep cold of January.

In the classroom, the work is leveling out, and production is in full swing, students are bending to their assignments, photography classes are in their first field shoot, the intro classes are getting deep into vector based illustration, and my gaming class is, I feel at last, on a solid footing. 

They are getting into their flash animations pretty well, and they and I are learning to blog. 

I must say as, a generally private person, I am still having a difficult time with this public sharing of thoughts and processes. I generally avoid the phone, and manage to ignore E-Mail unless it's a really important one that I absolutely must answer. I really like people and prefer my personal interactions face to face. And yet, I am absolutely fascinated by technology, where it is leading us, and generally, I can't wait for us to arrive. 

I know, this is a dichotomy that I must learn to reconcile, and perhaps this blog is a means towards that end.

As is always true in life, time will tell.

Progress comes slowly...

Well, we are just about halfway through the first semester of our first Game Design course and I just now feel that we are getting somewhere—that the prospect of success is slowly becoming a reality. 

The optimal word here is slowly. Through the first grading period, we upped our enrollment from six students to 20; added  8 new computers; installed updated operating systems across the entire lab of 20 computers; received a site license for Adobe Design Premium CS4  (then downgraded that to CS3 to match Globaloria's specifications and endured literally weeks of chasing Adobe tech support from Charleston, to Texas, to India, and finally to the Philippines, back to Charleston, then California in order to get the right software to download). And then, a fire in our internet routing system knocked us off the internet for a week. All of that was just to get ready to begin teaching. 

All twenty students are now up and running, and they are getting decently proficient on the Mac System, (only two students had Mac experience at the beginning of the class) so, OS X had to be taught before we could teach the software. Our wiki is up, student G-mail accounts are up and running, their wikis and blogs are started, and linked to the user wiki and students are working on game play as well as time based flash animation. Students have been assigned to update their blogs twice a week, each Monday and Friday and  for homework we are working on basic drawing skills.  

Approaching this from a graphic arts background, I am intent on making progress in their basic drawing skills. Less than 25 percent feel they have artistic skills—we'll soon see about that. The subject of "artistic ability" is one I really feel strongly about, and a subject I feel is related directly to "music ability". This is an issue will be the subject of a post here in the very near future.

But, for now, progress has come, and though slowly, it has arrived and I am excited, and at last, beginning to enjoy this new subject and new way of teaching. 

Adirondacks, Vermont Moose Country and you...

Well, here I sit on the sunny, sandy shore of Island Pond Vt. using campground wifi, posting to this blog and waiting to participate in the team online session. I've got five bars, on my ATT iPhone, I'm connected and ready to go, but exactly what "go" will consist of, I couldn't speak to that, and won't for another hour and 19 minutes. 

I am here, in the rural and still wild north woods, connected to the world, with the most modern of technology and what amazes me most is the northern light. I look up from my computer screen and see pristine waters, blue skies white clouds and limitless shades of green all playing in the amazing northern light which artists have been kidnapped by for centuries, and I say take me too. 

But not yet…

My assignment for the Fab Four Design Team was to do graphics for our game Inflation Blaster. 

Two of the controls I have been working on are the game timer, a monthly "clock" that will count down through a year in the life of the federal budget.  A year will  be the length of  the game play, though we haven't decided how long in minutes the game will be.

The second control I've been creating is the budget "thermometer" which will allow the player to gauge how well they are doing managing the US budget. The player will start with 1 trillion dollars and either spend and or create revenue as the game progresses through the months. Spend too much and you end up with no money spend money you don't have by either printing more, borrowing money or or taxing more and inflation kicks in and lowers the value of each dollar.

To design the clocks and the thermometers I used Freehand FX. It's an old version of a vector based  drawing program that was created by Macromedia and was part of their suite of apps which included Flash. Adobe bought Macromedia, kept Flash and killed Freehand, replacing it with their own vector based program, Illustrator, a program which I don't have, therefore the use of Freehand.  I think Freehand gives you more control of the artwork you can get with Flash. So far, for this game I have created  18 original drawings, 13 clocks, and 5 thermometers. complete with text, transparencies and drop shadows, each of the clock and thermometer pieces  are various colors, each different to alert the player as they near the end of the game or begin running out of money. 

These will be saved in the library as instances to be called to the game as the play progresses. the clocks in a sequential basis over a fixed amount of game play time, and the thermometer stages in various order, depending up the decisions made by the player.

I started with these two because they are the two devices that will determine game length and scoring. I think the other decisions about the game will be easier to visualize and  organize if we have the scoring and timing mechanisms in place. 

Here are two samples of the clock, one the beginning one is how the clock will look at the beginning of the game, (in January) the second nearing the end of the game (approaching December).

The next two images are thermometers, the first is what the player will see when the game starts—it represents a starting budget of 1 trillion dollars and the second will be what the player sees when spending decisions reduce the balance  enough to get below 250 billion dollars.

Check back as the game design progresses. 

Tonight, we search for MOOSE!