Flash Game Marketing Brochure

As mentioned in my last blog post, I have been working on a flyer to promote my Flash Game Class to prospective students. The flyer is now finished and has been delivered to over 120 eighth graders in all four of our middle schools.

The middle schools have just finished scheduling for next year with our guidance counselors from Wheeling Park. However, teachers I won't find out how many have enrolled in our classes until probably the middle of May. Even then, it will be just numbers of students per class. We don't get  student names and grade levels until we come back in the fall. This is not real efficient for for tracking how effective our recruitment efforts have been. But, after a couple weeks of school, I will have talked to enough students in my classes  to determine what prompted them to first consider, then actually enroll.

 Time will tell.

I included a few screen shots of the new flyer. It has some characters and artwork from our course last year, a shot of a student blog and a user gallery screen shot from this year.  There are also some general icons and screen shots of the flash interface. The back panel has comments from current game design students and a listing of GRAPHCOMM courses which students can take during their four years here at Wheeling Park.

Here they are...

Brochure Cover

Here is the back panel

Here is the inside.

Planning for next year...

Well it may seem odd that here I am not even through this year and already I am deeply wrapped in the next, but that is the way of life when your entire program is based on electives.

Late last fall, I was part of a group of teachers who visited all four of our county middle schools and had the opportunity to talk, for about 20 minutes, to the entire eighth grade class at each school.  I spent all of my time talking about the three courses which lack prerequisites and are therefore open to Freshmen. Those three are photography, Intro to Graphic Communications (GRAPHCOMM) and Flash Game Design.

At that time, I had them fill out a card ) and gave them the opportunity to fill in a check box if they wanted more information about any of the classes, and am happy to report that well over a hundred students requested additional information. I am currently putting the finishing touches on a brochure to be given to them before they register for next year and hope to have that finished, perhaps by tomorrow. In my next post, I'll report on how that turned out.

On the class front, paper prototyping is finishing up. About half the teams are finished and we are ready to move on through the curriculum and start building games. I think everyone is happy with that prospect.
I know I am.