Weather is wet, spirits are damp....

Wow, what a change a couple of days can make. It has been raining incessantly: the creeks are swollen and near their banks, the ground is soggy and the days, like the clouds are dim and disman, laden with foreboding darkness and a dank chill that belies the calendar. The only bright spot is that everywhere you look spring tress and flowers are pushing to bud, but are hesitant, sort of in a suspended state of perpetual waiting— is it going to get sunny and warm, or are we going backwards to the cold and dark of winter. It seems that the spring plants are unsure, hesitant, they wait for the sun. We had a brief bit of of it on Sunday Afternoon, and today it was pouring rain coming to work. I had to be here at 6:30 am this morning for WesTest training, that's our standardized yearly testing event which determines Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) and the whole school stops for this as you can well imagine. It is the end all and be all for education, whether that is good or bad, is much like the weather, it depends on your outlook.

Whether it is in fact the gray and sullen dampness of the weather or just the inevitable end of year spring burnout, there has been a decided change in the atmosphere of the school and in my classes as well. It is like pulling teeth in all my course, to keep kids working and focused on the task at hand.

In the game class we are too close to lose focus now. I'm going to schedule game demos tomorrow, then start having them rehearse their presentations. Then push on for the final coding.

Push is coming to shove—and while I know how to do both, leading and having them follow is easier on your back.

Here we go!
Coming down to the final push, Game demo's are finishing up and we are about to start scheduling demo's. So, today's blog doesn't have a real theme to it, just a mishmash of disconnected odds and ends that need clarified.

I did a demo on pseudo coding on Friday and sent the students a sample file of a partially working button as a controller for an object on the stage, with pseudo coding explaining all the code up to that point. I challenged them to work on the coding and parse it using pseudo coding to help them understand the coding better. Hopefully that will give them another tool to decipher scripting.

Most of the teams are progressing nicely, a few are not working together well and need constant prodding to continue on the path to a finished game.

I added all my students to my blog as blogs that I follow, so it should be pretty simple now to track updating by the students, and make grading much simpler to implement. To protect their privacy, you can see how I named each student.

We have just received our schedule requests for next year, but because this class falls outside our traditional Career and Technical course numbers, they were not included in the computer query to produce our schedule requests. They hope to get them printed out in the next few days, so while I won't have names or grades, just the number of enrollment requests, that will give me some idea of what I will have next year.

Time will tell.