Turbo's Game Design Blog

The Road Ahead....

2012-01-10T06:56:00.000-08:00

The new semester looms, the new year is here. Thursday, we start the final semester, and I will see what configuration my class will take. Who will be in, who will be out, who will be back. On Thursday, I'll make the final adjustments to the teams and begin with the actual building of the games.

Over the past 3 years, I have come to really like the process of game development. I think the educational process is worthwhile and thought provoking for the students. It's gratifying to watch the teams come together and form a cohesive unit working toward a single goal of building an educational game.

I'm looking forward to Thursday.

Choosing the direction…

2012-01-06T07:10:00.000-08:00

Student teams are working on their game ideas, but the semester about to change, and as always, unfortunately, that will disrupt the flow of this class. We have mock scheduling, semester exams, students changing classes and schedules early next week and then, the new semester officially starts next Thursday.

For my teams, it is creating problems. Because of schedule conflicts, I am losing two members of one team. This loss will set that team back because one of the students leaving was placed on that team specifically for the leadership skills which the student has demonstrated early on in this class.

I am also losing one of only two girls in the class and I hate to see that. Losing or diminishing the female perspective in a class tends to change the class somewhat, and usually, not for the better.

In order to rebuild that team, I will have to take students from other teams, which will hurt them. There seems to be no easy choices here. There is a bit of good news on the horizon. The possibility exists that one of my former game design students from the first year, who is now a graduating senior, may be back in this class. That student is looking for a class to fill their schedule and I offered to allow a return for the second half of this course. This would be a great addition to this currentclass, but at this point, I don't know for sure if that will come to pass.

Time will tell. It always does.

Let the Games Begin…

2011-11-15T19:02:00.000-08:00

Today, I divided my class into teams and had them start their initial discussions about the area of focus they want to pursue and the type of competition in which they wish to participate.

The majority seemed to immediately lean toward STEM type games, but I cautioned them not to make a hasty decision and to let each team member fully participate in the discussion. It was interesting to listen to the give and take going on around the classroom. A repeating thread in the discussions seemed to center up the idea that if students were not good in math, or not good in history, they didn't want to have anything to do with a game covering that subject. I tried to caution them that perhaps that is exactly the area their games should focus upon. I explained that not only would they be helping themselves to further acquire some mastery in a subject they find difficult, but that they also may have the opportunity to create a game that will, in the future, provide an easier learning path for students yet to reach their grade level.

That thought seemed to have some impact as if for the first time they considered that what they were about to embark upon could have a lasting and positive effect on someone they have never met. As a teacher I could relate, isn't that why we are here? We know we will affect our students, but we secretly hope our influence will then be passed on by our students to others, yet unknown.

The seed was planted today, time will tell.
Will it grow, or will it wither.

MiniGame Games

2011-11-09T06:27:00.000-08:00

Ah, the joys of the mini-game project.

In my game design course, one of the projects we undertake is the development of a mini-game—a one level game where you are a rabbit chasing a carrot and a wolf chases you. If you get the carrot before the wolf gets you, you score points. If the wolf gets you first, you lose points.

It's a simple concept, but it teaches many of the concepts used in almost all games: A character controlled by the player; an antagonist using artificial intelligence to stalk the protagonist; dynamic scoring, scrolling objects, and hit or collision tests to register the game play.

The students are provided with the game pieces and then are lead through the various steps in Flash necessary to code the game. It really is a great way to introduce the students to the concept of using a scripting program such as Flash to construct a game.

Of course, with any "language" on a computer, accuracy in writing code is always paramount. Because computer languages are limited to the keys on the keyboard, each keystroke is jealously guarded. There are simply no throw away keystrokes. This strict attention to detail, and obsessive judiciousness in accounting for the effect of each and every keystroke applied, is usually quite a shock for young students, who are used to operating in the modern society where close enough is good enough.

That world comes to a screeching halt when it comes to writing code. It's a fun process to observe in your students, as they are forced to pay attention to each and every keystroke. It requires discipline, and logic to adhere to coding constructs. If there is one thing that American education could benefit from it is certainly the introduction of material that requires students to exhibit a thoughtful, disciplined approach to the subject at hand.

Moving Along.... Literally

2011-11-07T06:15:00.000-08:00

Well our move into our new home is complete, we now have cable and internet connected and slowly things are getting normalized. When you move after 35 years in one location, it is quite a disruption in your life.

Besides that, it is a tremendous amount of work. We have been working non stop since January de-cluttering, painting, fixing up, cleaning out, redecorating and doing all the little things that make a house desirable on the open market.

We decided to sell the home ourselves, and in retrospect, it worked out well for us. After only three days on the market, we had an acceptable offer from the third couple we showed the house to—a great young couple who are expecting their first child in April! The expectant mother is a graduate of Wheeling Park, who played basketball with our daughter and whose parents live several blocks away. She and her husband moved back to Wheeling from New York and they were thrilled to be able live in her old neighborhood, and we we thrilled to sell our house to a young couple who are about the same age we were when we bought the house. What's that about a circle of life?

The inspection, appraisal, and closing went without a hitch, so all in all we are quite pleased, and are now settling into our smaller place, looking forward to less work and more time to devote to our students and ourselves.

I have an recently developed ongoing glitch with our school's grading program, for most of the last week, I haven't been able to access the grades or attendance for my game design class IT is trying to get this resolved but as of this morning, no luck.......

The joys of poorly designed software. I wish everything in life worked as well as my Macs.

2011-10-25T11:09:00.000-07:00

I implemented a new wiki page procedure for my game design students.

For the remainder of the year, any item posted to the student wiki's must be posted in italic, must be magenta colored and must be begin flush left with the edge of the page.

I have two reasons for doing this:
First it will get the students in the habit of practicing wiki coding. This will help them develop an awareness of the importance and value of each keystroke and symbol in coding.

Additionally, it will make reading the wikis, whether by me, the Globaloria team, or a researcher, uniform across all projects pages for all Wheeling Park students. This will enable me to grade projects more rapidly and track at a glance, which projects students have completed and which are still in progress.

Here is a screen shot of the sample page I coded to demonstrate to the students, the style I wanted our wiki project pages to follow.

2011-10-18T10:43:00.000-07:00

Well.

We're back into the swing of things for Game Design Class—one class this year with 19 students, seventeen boys and two girls. It's an interesting combination. This is the smallest number of girls I have had in my game design class. It will be interesting to see what affect, if any, this will have on the type of games developed or the output of the class.

I have an assistant this year, a senior student. He is a great young man and has been in my graphics classes for four years and he previously took the Game Design Class. It is wonderful to have him in the class, assisting the students.

This has been the most hectic of starts for me this year, because my free time after school and this summer before school began, has been spent in a frenzy of activity. Our daughter got married on July 22, with all the attendant planning and organizing. Also, we were—and are—in the middle of selling our house and moving. We close on Friday of this week. Since the wedding, It has been nonstop work, getting two places ready, one to move out of and one to move into. This has really impacted outside of school prep and planning time. Thankfully, we are almost done and things should be getting back to normal. A new normal, with a married daughter and a new home, but a norman none the less.

Weather is wet, spirits are damp....

2011-04-19T06:44:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-04-12T05:55:00.000-07:00

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.

Flash Game Marketing Brochure

2011-03-11T11:05:00.000-08:00

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...

2011-03-03T05:15:00.000-08:00

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.

Ah, a "normal" schedule…

2011-02-25T05:51:00.000-08:00

Well, this week was a short one. Last Friday we had another ISE day. (teachers report, students do not)
Monday was Presidents day, Tuesday was a snow day, and Wednesday was activity period, classes are shortened and class order is altered. Thursday and today were normal days.

To attempt to make up some lost ground time-wise, I had the students do an abbreviated blog so they would still blog, but not spend a lot of time blogging.

That's what I am doing today. I'm reworking users gallery to reflect students who have gone inactive, or been switched to another class time from their first semester schedule, so that the gallery accurately reflects the class and team makeup.

This is a good exercise for me because it enables me to become more competent in wiki management. So, for now, I'm off to see the wiki.

May I meet no fireball hurling witches on roofs, nor flying monkeys.

Paper, Paper, Everywhere…

2011-02-15T06:17:00.000-08:00

Time passes, as you knew it would, and the teams are deep into the paper prototyping process. There are paper files and colored markers everywhere, and a general feeling of excitement is evident. Plans are being revised and refined, characters and scenes devised, buttons and controls, being plotted and sketched.

I am truly excited by some of the concepts that the students have developed. I think several of them are somewhat unique. I hope my young teams of game designers are as thorough in their execution as they are in their development of the concept.

Interim grades for this nine weeks were put out yesterday and the a number of students are upset with the grades they earned for their lack of work upgrading their team wiki pages. The good news for them is those grades are temporary, of course that truth lies with the student. They will be temporary if they want them to be temporary and subsequently, devote more time to maintaining the reporting and recording infrastructure of the Globaloria platform.

As Shakespeare said so succinctly "ay, there's the rub."

Paper Prototyping and Mandolin Music

2011-02-02T05:26:00.000-08:00

Our student teams are divided and are working hard on the process of devising their paper prototyping. I have been going around to each team, watching the process and interacting in a non-instructional way. I've been trying to limit my interaction with them to the position of an interested bystander, who sees what they are doing and just asks questions of the process or "what if" type of interjections. It really is enjoyable to watch the thought processes of the students and to watch the personalities and the leadership emerge from the teams.

Weather has not been cooperating lately, but this is the first week it looks like we will be mostly in school for full days. Yesterday there was a two hour delay, but Monday was a normal day, and so is today. The big storm that has been hammering the rest of the country has missed our little valley here in West Virginia and we only ended getting hit with quite a bit of rain. It's warm, nearly 50, but the temperature is supposed to drop quickly this afternoon to well below freezing, so we shall see what the day brings us.

I'm siting here during my planning period and as I write, I'm listening to this beautiful recorded bit of artistry called Mandolin and Friends. Since 6:30 this morning, I have been looping endlessly a lovely song called Anna One. It is an old friend of mine. I first heard this collection as a home copied cassette given to me by a fellow mandolin player at a bluegrass festival in Columbus, Ohio in the mid 90's. It had no information with it as to players or songs, but I loved it from the first time I put in my tape deck. I literally wore it out playing it a number of years ago. Since then I have searched everywhere for it and could never find it. Last week, a bluegrass friend mentioned to me that he was playing this incredible CD called Mandolin and Friends and I about tackled him with excitement. It turns out it is was originally a Cracker Barrel CD, and is currently out of print. He was kind enough to make a CD copy of it for me and I am a again getting reacquainted with this beautiful, all instrumental album.

I kissed my wife goodbye this morning in bed and got an early start here today. Looking forward to seeing my gamer kidz in 15 minutes. Life is a wonder.

PS.
Just as I finished proofreading the above, and was getting ready to publish, the bell rang and the game kids came in. I kept the music playing, thinking that I would elevate their ears and expose them to this beautiful melody. Taylor, who sits right in front of my desk, came in, heard the music, looked around and said, "it sounds like Panera Bread in here."

Ah, the reality of my life among the teencreatures intrudes into my little early morning reverie.

I must go, they await.

Watching a democracy

2011-01-14T05:39:00.000-08:00

This has turned out to be a short week.

On Monday, we began the new semester. It was a normal day time wise, but so far, that is the only day that was. Tuesday was a two hour, early dismissal—the first I can remember in my 19 years at Park. I guess with the prediction of snow that was to begin around noon, (and it did) the county administration wanted to get the kids home and off the highways before things got bad. (and they did, and it was)

Yesterday we were closed and today we are on a two hour delay, so all the classes will be shortened again, not a great framework for class productivity, but one of the pipers that must be paid when no one in a consolidated school lives within walking distance.

Due to the new semester scheduling for the game design courses and the students in them, we have had some major upheaval in our game design teams. My first period Game Design class was moved to second period, but my period seven class stayed put. Due to scheduling conflicts, nine students have been moved into first period from period seven and nine students moved to seventh period. Of the period one, original four teams, each with four members, two teams have only one remaining member, one has two members and fourth has three members.

I have opted to let the class decide how to reconfigure the teams and we spent the short time we had today debating the pros and cons of a variety of methods. It was interesting to watch this mini-democracy in action. Some were strong advocates for their positions, some were passive and non-committal. Some were peacemakers and some were vocal in their opposition or support of a particular method.

It was illuminating to know their personalities and then put their positions and responses in that context as the debate continued. Odds are we will be on a two hour delay tomorrow, so we'll hopefully we'll get the teams reconfigured by tomorrow. I anticipate the same situation will occur in my 7th period class this afternoon.

The Last Week of the Semester

2011-01-04T05:33:00.000-08:00

We are back from Christmas break and getting the students geared back into school mode. And they seem pretty excited to be back in school, and back into game mode.

We are currently doing the visualize my game sequence in the curriculum and the students are hard at work completing that requirement.

On Friday, we'll do mock scheduling and then on Monday we will start a new semester. I'll need to do some rearranging of the teams because my first period game design class moves to period two, and therefore there are several students who, because of conflicts, will be transferred to my seventh period game class and a few students in that class, for the same reason, will be moved to second period.

Teachers don't have the final class rosters yet, so I don't know how many, but I know from talking to my students, who already have their schedules, some adjustments will need to be made.

I have learned a many things in my life, and a few of these things have proved to be universal truths. The following certainly is: The only thing which never changes, is that everything always changes.

Welcome to the new year.

Life is good!

2010-09-24T05:10:00.000-07:00

Two words sum up how my Globaloria classes are going this year, as opposed to last year:
Absolutely and fabulous.

What a difference a year has made in my understanding and comfort level leading this class. Perhaps I have been a teacher too long, and have forgotten the feeling of mastering a new subject. Perhaps 18 years ago, when I was a new teacher and came back for my second year, I felt this good, but I really can't recall being elated about a new year like I am about this year.

We are so far ahead of last year. Every student has a computer and every computer has CS4 installed and ready to go. Both my classes are organized, files uploaded and avatars all updated. Blogging schedules and learning log update schedules have already been loaded into iCal for the entire year. We are now embarking on getting blog rolls set up, profiles on the wiki and blogs established and then it is on to working with wiki code so the students can update their learning logs on a daily basis.

To all of my fellow Globaloria teachers who are embarking on this platform for your first year, I can only offer encouragement. Hang in there. I know well that feeling of being overwhelmed. But trust me, there is life on the the other side of year one, and so far it is all milk and honey.

In my last blog, mentioned that I was heading to the Mohican Bluegrass Festival with our student bluegrass band to perform. What a great job they did, and what an exceptionally nice group of students. it was an absolute pleasure to spend the weekend with the students.

I need one of those "life is good" T-shirts!

Welcome to the World of Flash Game Design

2010-09-13T18:26:00.000-07:00

As the calendar year slides into the ebb tide of fall, bringing winter looming just over the horizon, unseen yet hovering— a new year has begun—new classes, new students, new hopes and new goals.

Hope springs eternal from the hearts of educators at this time of year, hope that even as the physical year ends and a new academic year begins—full of life, of promise and opportunities—that the year will prove fruitful and abundant for our students. I fervently hope that those entrusted to me will learn the subject at hand, but more importantly, will learn the lessons of life that flit about us all as we travail the pathways of our daily existence.

In a real sense, the Globaloria platform is alive and well at this scholarly home we call Wheeling Park. Due to increased enrollment, a second class has been offered, and from last year's 20 students, we are starting this year with 34. Word of mouth about the program seems to have lead to this increased enrollment. Enrollment is up across all my classes and at the school as well, this is the largest incoming freshman class we have had in several years, topping out at well over 525 students. It has lead to welcome problems, two of my graphics classes have 25 students each, leaving me with a shortage of computers to accommodate the higher enrollment. Hopefully that will soon be rectified. New computers are on order and are eagerly being awaited.

The year is off to a fast start, we are already 12.5 % through the class with interim reports coming up this week; quarterly reports due to Globaloria on the 15th. The week finishes with a road trip for the school's bluegrass program, of which I am a faculty sponsor. We head out on Thursday after school, and stay until Sunday camping and performing at the Mohican Bluegrass Festival, Loudenville, OH.

A busy, busy, week, awaits, one that I had best wrestle into shape, and quickly! So, my new gaming students, "welcome" to Globaloria.

You are about to embark on an enjoyable and enlightening year, exploring the Globaloria platform of game design.

2010-07-08T08:45:00.000-07:00

When I was in 7th grade, two events occurred which have loomed large in the history of the 20th Century: In November of 1963, President John F Kennedy was assassinated, and in February 1964, just a month after I Wanna Hold your Hand became the number one pop song in America, the Beatles made their initial appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show.

Beatlemania had arrived.

Like many who were teenagers when the Beatles first became popular, my favorite Beatles are Lennon and McCartney, but probably for reasons far different than most people who would pick them as their favorites. I'm not a diehard fan of the Beatles, though their 1964 recordings of I Wanna Hold your Hand and I Saw Her Standing There were the first songs, as a 13 year old, I can consciously remember singing and dancing to at my first jr. high dance. The wonder of the discovery that a teenage girl could be an object of desire, will for me, be forever linked to those two songs. So I can't totally dismiss the Beatles; I did eventually win one of those objects of my desire and have managed to hold on to her for 35 years. Ah, but I digress...

Lennon and McCartney were the singers in the Beatles, and it is their singing style, more importantly their vocal influences that draw me to them. In my heart, I am lost in the high lonesome vocals and the frenetic beat of the music of an American musical genius, Bill Monroe and his self invented bluegrass music. I love his music on a multitude of levels and am fascinated by the influence which this singular, aloof Kentuckian has had on American musical culture. Virtually every aspect of Rock 'n Roll and all the derivatives descended it have been profoundly influenced by the music of Bill Monroe. It is a subject worthy of a serious analytical effort, but for today, I'll just explore the influence on the Beatles which Bill Monroe had— although, there is no evidence I have found that leads me to believe they were even aware of Bluegrass Music, and were therefore surely unaware of the influence this uniquely American music had on their own.

Lennon and McCartney were keenly aware however, of two young Kentuckians who preceded them in the music business by a decade: Don and Phil, the Everly Brothers. These two brothers perfected a vocal styling and harmony arrangement that was consciously and deliberately copied by the Beatles as their own, and was just as deliberately copied by the Everly Brothers from the great brother duets of southern rural music who preceded them, chief among them, Charlie Monroe and his younger brother Bill.

That the Everly brothers influenced The Beatles cannot be disputed. The Beatles themselves have acknowledged it: Of I Saw Her Standing There Lennon later observed "We were just writing songs a la the Everly Brothers a la Buddy Holly..."

http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/personalities/ten_great_beatles_moments.php

As a duet, Charlie Monroe sang the lead and Bill sang a harmony part, usually a third above, sometimes soaring to a fifth above, what in Bluegrass we call the high Baritone. The Everly Brothers followed this classic bluegrass harmony structure, Lead sung by Don, Tenor, a third above sung by Phil, It is no secret that Lennon and McCartney copied this structure.

"Lennon and McCartney consciously copied Don and Phil Everly's distinctive two-part harmonies. Their vocals on two recordings, Love Me Do and Please Please Me were inspired by the Everlys' powerful vocal innovation on Cathy's Clown, (1960) the first recording to ever reach number one simultaneously in the USA and England. Two of Us the opening track on Let It Be is overtly composed in the Everly style and McCartney acknowledges this in the recording with a spoken, 'Take it Phil.' "

http://www.liverpoolcityportal.co.uk/beatles/beatles_influences.html

So the influence of the Everly Brothers is clear.—but were the Everlys influenced by Bill Monroe? Absolutely!
Ricky Skaggs, in Bill Monroe, The Father of Bluegrass Music is described as "convincingly traces the vocal harmonies of Monroe's early bands through the Delmore Brothers, The Blue Sky boys and the and the Louvin Brothers to the Everly Brothers,
http://www.amazon.com/Bill-Monroe-Father-Bluegrass-Music/dp/B00000IREE

And in the New World Encyclopedia, Monroe is cited as having "influenced musicians as diverse as the Everly Brothers, Elvis Presley, George Jones Emmy Lou Harris, Dolly Parton and Jerry Garcia.
So there you have it easily verifiable proof of the Monroe's influence on the Everly Brothers and their influence on the Beatles.
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Bill_Monroe

But Bill Monroe had some pretty profound influences on other aspects of modern popular music. In Texas, at about the same time the Everly Brothers were copying his vocal style, a skinny dark haired boy with thick glasses, was running around his home town performing in his own bluegrass band, featuring banjo and mandolin, and singing in the high keening and hiccupping style often used by Monroe.

He was of course Buddy Holly, but that is the subject for another post.

2010-06-07T08:34:00.000-07:00

Well, my friends, in about 4 short hours the school year is over for the students.

My last exam is underway and I am working on final grades. This is always a melancholy time of the year for me on most levels and a happy time on a few others. While I am glad to have a break from my students, I worry about them over the summer, especially those I know who are in my program and coming back to my classes in the fall and those whom I know have not the ideal home life.

So yes, I'm glad to be done with the grind of “it's showtime” every 45 minutes (Cue the Bob Fosse images and the All That Jazz soundtrack) and am surely looking forward to a break and a chance to regroup and relax, but I also know from experience, that this break and finally the time to reflect will lead to the inevitable reassessment that all good teachers go through as we look back over the year and ponder what has transpired—for better or worse—and what worked and what didn't.

This has been a huge learning year for me.

Belatedly, about two months into the year, I finally received the new Adobe Creative software suite which enabled me to open up a whole new world of graphic and design capabilities across every class I teach. For the first time in my teaching career, I finally had access to a unified suite of the industry standards software for content creation. But, it also meant that I had to learn new software for every course I had been teaching as well as new software and a whole new educational paradigm in the Globaloria Flash Game course, a course I taught for the first time this year. Because the software didn't arrive until almost the end of the first 9 weeks, it meant that I had to teach material that I was just learning. I spent the entire year jumping back and forth from researching and learning how to accomplish something in the software to immediately teaching that concept, then jumping into another software program and doing the same thing.

Rinse and Repeat. All. Year. Long

If you are old enough, to recall the Ed Sullivan Show and the man with the plates spinning on the wooden sticks. I swear I heard Ed several times this year, in the background, introducing me as part of his “really big shew.”

The learning curve was steep in all my courses. For example. I now had access to InDesign, for layouts and publication creation. I had never had access to this software before, I had, in the early and mid 90's used several versions of Pagemaker, but had never had access to Quark. After Pagemaker went defunct, I used Freehand for for all my design and layout work for my classes. This was not the best solution but by necessity, because that was the only program I had.

In my graphics classes I now had a Illustrator, which I had never used. All the old knowledge I had of Freehand—gone—assigned to the dustbin of history (as President Reagan once opined about the Soviet Union.) So a whole new learning process for that program ensued.

Then there was the Flash Game Course. A brand new course, a brand new concept for me and of course a brand new software package, which I had never really taught before, as well as the other component of the game course, assimilating all the workings of and then the teaching Web 2.0 and avatars, wikis and blogs, oh my! (Apologies to the Wizard of Oz, still my daughter and my favorite movie)

I now had a workable version of Photoshop for my photography and graphic classes. I had previously had access to photoshop 4 but it wouldn't run on the new intel Processors of my new computers under Leopard so that was a new huge learning load. I also for the first time ever had a computer for every one of the students in my classes. No more sharing, no more getting a computer every other or every third day. Each student had their own computer, and their own user account every day. It was wonderful to give my student such access, but also meant more software to teach because now I could fully teach the operating system to my students, which at least I knew. And giving every student computer access every day, meant that projects got done in half the time of previous years which required that I learn the new software at an accelerated pace
.
I had a full load of classes, sponsorship of two school clubs and two school bluegrass bands as well as the mentoring of a sophomore homeroom and an advisory class.

It was a year for the books.

A year of great progress and great frustrations. And really, the planning for next year has already begun. We are officially done on Wednesday the 9th and on the 14th I am scheduled to teach a week long mini academy in Game Design, and Photoshop to interested incoming freshmen. Probably just the mini game portion of the class and some basic drawing and maybe some time base animations, keyframing and tweening.

For the Fall, my enrollment in all my classes is up from last year, particularly in the Game Design Classes, yes that's right
c-l-a-s-s-e-s, plural. Last year because we got invited to become a Globaloria school, after scheduling was completed, I started with six students enrolled in the game class at the start of the year, and this year I already have 30 students, a five fold increase in enrollment!

The students in this years class loved the course and in a high school, word travels fast about which courses and which teachers are good which classes are interesting and worthwhile and which are not. So despite all the obstacles, I already have enrolled enough students for two classes, and I'm sure by the time schedules are finalized with the inevitable changes and as late enrollments come in over the summer, I'll have two full classes, of 20—40 eager little gamers.

So, lots to assess, lots to evaluate, lots to do between now and then, for this class and all my courses. So I'll enjoy Thursday and Friday this week and then Monday back to teaching...

…and miles to go before I sleep,
and miles to go before I sleep.

Look for a newly designed Blog for the upcoming year!

2010-05-07T06:30:00.000-07:00

There is an issue that I've been following for quite a while now, that has the potential to have a direct impact on the Globaloria Program and that issue is the philosophical differences between Adobe and Apple over Flash.

In a nutshell, here is the situation as it now stands: Adobe wants Flash everywhere, Apple does not want Flash anywhere on any Apple mobile device. The Safari browser, which Apple uses on the iPhone, the iPod Touch and the iPad does not support Flash.

Adobe says publicly that Apple is being proprietary by denying Flash to Apple's mobile users, and is being proprietary because Apple wants to lock users into iTunes and that source of revenue, actions which Adobe says denies Apple uses full use of the web for delivery of video and interactive content. Apple counters that there is no flash player available for mobile devices, that flash is not designed for touch interfaces, is not an open standard and that the 100 million or so people who have bought Apple mobile devises, are happy navigating the web without Flash. They want developers to use HTML5, and H.264 which are open, (but not yet in the case of HTML5 ) an approved standards. Apple claims they are looking to the future, not the past and the Flash is definitely the past.

It is a complex issue with millions of dollars and the very nature of the future web dangling in the balance.

It is so important that Steve Jobs, Apple co-founder and CEO, and arguably the most influential individual in technology today, has issued a rare public letter to Adobe. Only one other time that I can recall, has Jobs done such a public missive, and that was when he was arguing for the elimination of DRM (digital rights management) on music tracks in the iTunes store. Incidentally Jobs was successful in getting the record labels to abandon DRM.

It is a hugely fascinating battle as the these two tech giants, Apple, the new media titan and Adobe, the dominant maker of software for digital content creation, argue for the adoption of their view of the future web.

Who will win, I couldn't say, but if I were a betting man, it would double down on Steve Jobs. He simply has the best track record over time.

If you are interested, below is the link to Jobs' public letter to Adobe. He does a thorough job of laying out Apple's contention about what they think is wrong with Flash on mobile devices. It will be interesting to see if Adobe makes a point by point rebuttal to Jobs.

It is an interesting and vital issue for all of us deep into the world of Flash.

Here is the link:

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

2010-04-27T04:42:00.000-07:00

Well, we're coming down the line to the final full month of school, and the final push on games is on in earnest.

All three teams have decided to compete in the STEM contest. All three teams are up and running for the finish line;
Paper prototyping is completed and posted on the team wikis and the game demos have been posted as well. Most of their game characters are finished and some of the related artwork, backgrounds, grids etc. are as well. This week I expect game components to begin being assembled, and coded, and I hope that goes well.

We shall see what we shall see. There are many... well, there's the 7:40 bell, the kids are coming in, time to get to work....

GAME ON!

2010-03-15T00:37:00.000-07:00

The students are all divided into teams, they all have team names, team wiki pages posted, their avatars are mostly done and they are meeting as teams to begin the process of game design.

We are back in school full time, daylight savings time is here, the snow is gone and we are just a few days from the first day of spring. Hopefully, here at school, we will have no more snow days, two hour delays, or early dismissals, and we will be able to stay on track to complete this course, on time, in full and with good games to show for the work of the students.

I have at least one team interested at this point in competing in the stem contest (creating a game about Science, Technology, Engineering, or Math,) and hopefully, the other two teams will opt to compete as well.

There was a fund raiser for Randy Stephens this week. I attended and was pleased that Randy was able to attend as well. I was able to talk to him for a while to catch him up on what has been happening in the class. He told me he hopes to be participating again as soon a his recovers from his treatments. He has been following the E-mail trail as we set up our teams, he knows the team he is on and he knows we have set it up so he can contribute as much as he feels he is able to contribute, as his health permits.

We are pulling for him and the students all want him back in the class ASAP. I'm sure not as intently as Randy and his parents would like to see him back in class. Hopefully, we'll all get our wish sooner rather than later.

2009-12-14T08:28:00.000-08:00

Students are taking the quarterly student survey, so I thought I would use this time to post to my blog.

Well, the first winter storm blew in on Wednesday afternoon, knocking out power to our school and about 35,000 other local customers of AEP.

Because of that, we were closed on Thursday, but school reopened on Friday. Unfortunately, every computer in the school had to be shut down and the servers reset and then we did rolling boot ups at various parts of the school. Computer service was restored late Friday, so today we are catching up on business.

The end result of the interruption last week, is that things don't always go as planned. I had originally planned to do the student surveys on Thursday. Then, thought that I'd get the student surveys done on Friday when we reopened. Now we're doing them today, but we're getting "server is busy signals" on the Surveymonkey site, which is preventing some of the students from loading the survey. Hopefully, as the students who logged on first finish their surveys, others will be able to log on and we'll get them all done today.

When the computers were shut down on Friday, I had the game design students meet in their teams and start to continue their game ideas, and what direction each team will pursue. So, although we couldn't do the survey or mini game, all was not lost.

My goal is to have the mini game done by the Christmas break so in January, we will be able to begin the game creation process.

That's the plan. The kids are ready and anxious to get started and so I am.

2009-12-09T07:35:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-12-07T07:05:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-11-23T05:13:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-11-16T07:14:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-03T05:05:00.000-08:00

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...

2009-10-26T07:55:00.000-07:00

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...

2009-07-27T11:06:00.000-07:00

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!

Linked blogs

2009-06-24T22:52:00.000-07:00

I've linked to two blogs, The Bluegrass Blog and Applied Game Design. AGD is a logical choice, since this blog is after all about game design.

The second choice, The Bluegrass Blog is not quite so apparent. But I link to it as a general all purpose "what's happening in Bluegrass Music." This is important to me because one of the activities I have undertaken at my school is the creation of student bluegrass bands. I am the faculty co-sponsor with Kim Mattis our Media Center Director of the WPHS Bluegrass Club and bands.

I started this club and these bands to make our students aware of our Appalachian music culture, and because I see Bluegrass as an incredibly honest music, that has very strong thematic underpinnings in the very areas of Amerian culture which current pop culture ridicules: family, faith and community. It is these very areas where bluegrass music provides a teachable moment in just about every song. The idea of games teaching bluegrass music, or involving the themes of bluegrass music is something which intrigues me, and which I hope to further develop as I delve deeper into the particulars of game design.

2009-06-24T10:24:00.001-07:00

2009-06-24T10:16:00.000-07:00

This is my first post on the game design blog. Welcome! I have 20 students signed up for class in the fall. I'm eager to see them and eager to get them started in social media and game design.