Working Group Notes

1
Working Group Notes

• This presentation consists of slides created
  on-the-spot during the working groups of the
  Teaching Methods session during the IGDA
  Education Curriculum Workshop.

2
Theory and Practice

• The definition of theory and practice differs
  depending on
• Who you are/what you are teaching
• Whether you have a full degree program, or a few
• Whats the outcome desired?
• a beautiful project/portfolio,
• a deep understanding of theory with conceptual
  prototypes,
• deep knowledge of a given tool
• or all of the above.

3
Theory and Practice

• How much do industry demands dictate specific
  tool/language knowledge?
• Animation studios will often take a skilled
  traditional animator vs someone with skills in a
  tools set as its easier to teach the tool. Is
  that similar for the game industry?
• Instructor Experiences
• One programming teacher, over the course of three
  iterations of the same class, went from heavy in
  theory to teaching only the API. The latter
  group had the best projects but it was not clear
  what what else they walked away with.
• Our assert creation instructor had found that his
  balance of 1/3rd theory, 1/3rd application, 1/3rd
  of class time for practice has proven the best
  mix for asset creation.
• One theory and narrative professor ignores tool
  choice and leaves that up to the student but
  students will often run into trouble balancing
  technical and narrative focus during the
  prototype implementation stage.
• If the theory focused on is game play, level and
  puzzle design, etc it may be best to pick a
  lightweight tools for shorter learning curves and
  more focus on development timelines. Playability,
  etc.
• If the focus of the course is technical, the
  desired outcomes listed above should help decide
  the balance

4
Games as Texts Resistance

• What is the purpose of writing about games?
• "Magician training school"
• How to write?
• mechanics
• audience

5
Games as Texts Game Assignments

• Use a game
• analyze different aspects
• the interface
• older games
• force them to go beyond eye candy
• useful as models for student projects
• Use movies as examples
• Choose your own game
• write about over the course period
• Use a board game
• mechanics
• Diplomacy

6
Games as Texts What students need

• Tools
• conceptual vocabulary
• narrative
• acts, hero's quest
• books
• Rollins and Adams
• Rules of Play
• Handbook of Game Design
• Examples
• films
• board games
• video games
• video clips from IGN
• Feedback
• writing and feedback

7
Games as Texts Assignments

• Pick a game
• analyze using different topics over the quarter
• Write a game review
• using industry standards
• Game syllabus
• key defining games
• common discussion
• Game demo
• work through the same scenes
• Machinima
• create a scene

8
Community Building

• Faculty community
• Have many opportunities with conferences, IGDA,
  SIGGRAPH etc.
• Need help to build community among our students
• Game developers club
• IGDA Student Chapter
• ACM Chapters
• Game competitions

9
Community Building

• Game/arts studio lab space
• Informal lab space outside a classroom lab(with
  a couch, tables, coffee and food)
• Have labs open during breaks
• Key card access
• Make it more of a social space
• Give students some control of space
• Pay for your lab with lab fees
• Have students maintain the lab

10
Community Building

• Attract more women
• Hire female students to work in the studio
• Recruit more students
• Email students that are taking a math class to
  recruit for a particular class or degree
• Collaborative team projects
• Collaborative projects across the curriculum
• Art, CAD, Social Science, English
• Offer money, offer extra credit

11
Community Building

• Alumni
• Email list of alumni
• Get on list close to graduation
• Yahoo email list News Current Events
• Have alumni talk to current students

12
Community Building - Deterrents

• Students dont want to share their great game
  idea
• Need to figure out way to work around the IT
  department
• Lots of organizations are competing for students
• World of Warcraft
• Second Life
• MMOs
• Other campus organizations frats/sororities

13
Participants

• Yusuf Pisan, Univ of Technology, Sydney
• Jerry Rosenberg, Edmonds Community College,
  Lakeland, WA
• Matthew Bivens, Leuzinger High School, Lawndale,
  CA
• Ian Horswill, Northwestern University, Evanston,
  IL
• Carlotta Eaton, New River Community College,
  Dublin, VA

14
Inter-institutional Collaboration

• Industry wants schools to share resources
• Schools may not want to share
• job sharing/posting with student projects
• Instructors find partners across schools and have
  mutually timed indep. studies/classes and share
  projects
• Help fill missing holes on teams
• Help schools with diff. strengths
• XSI Base, students post their work, blogging,
  build relationships (grassroots), growing

15
Inter-institutional Collaboration

• Meeting mutual needs
• Sharing/exchange instructors?
• Site visits/tours
• Material
• Schools help each other to improve quality of
  game education overall (improve view of other
  academic fields)
• IGDA
• Students join, industry members help with reviews
• Student chapters in established areas/schools
  take on newer groups from nearby schools

16
Inter-institutional Collaboration

• Companies recruiting
• Coordinate with your neighbors for
  showcases/visits so that companies recruiters can
  sweep through your area and not compete with
  schools (idea modeled off of PhD programs
  coordinating visit days)
• Build rapport of student work/raise standards
  across schools

17
Inter-institutional Collaboration

• Devils advocate cooperation bad?
• If youre in, not want to give it up
• Survival of the fittest? (game programs die,
  student backlash, programs become very selective)
• Maybe some schools calling game student not
  really, could hurt view of real game students
• Is everyone jumping in on the bandwagon? Also
  programs suffer if theyve not been given proper
  internal support/resources

18
Inter-institutional Collaboration

• Peer review and consulting
• Longer-time faculty/schools help other
  schools/program build the new program
• Curriculum review board? Are people afraid?
• Separate institution for peer reviewthird party
  accreditation? Maybe more collaborative/collegiate
  organization
• Voluntary list of people to helpIGDA maintain
  list?
• Issues of who owns your school

19
Inter-institutional Collaboration

• Conferences
• GDC
• Whats must go to? Is GDC it?
• SIGGRAPH and game track
• IDMAA internation digital media arts assoc.
• How many conferences? All of this is expensive
  and time consumingmaybe we dont have THE
  academic game conf?
• IDGA is education friendly
• GDC education proposals get dumped to IGDA (set
  up educators track for subset of IGDA track?)
• Educators educate other educators

20
Inter-institutional Collaboration

• Physical location?
• Can we have an expanded listserve
• IGDA edu mails too muchmaybe need separate
  lists? Other way to process/post/participate?
• List of game programs
• Game career guide site? (was on gamasutra)
• Any school who doesnt put themselves there not
  really part of the community
• List of schools who participate in peer review
  process
• Too controversial too organize by types of
  programs
• Tech schools vs higher-education

21
Inter-institutional Collaboration

• Collaboration with research
• Ex) mobile gaming
• Could be a lot more with research

22
Collaborative Projects

• Students reviewing students some part of grade
  is from those reviews
• Team leaders also evaluated along with the whole
  group on a project
• If one person not pulling weight, then bring in
  the teacher
• Can be very difficult to evaluate individual work
  in a group, of course, but the point is to
  participate, not necessarily to succeed

23
Collaborative Projects

• A project group will include laborers and
  managers as they age they move up
• Much depends on length of time students have
• Initial excitement vs. second-term burnout
• Collaboration is a critical skill for the real
  world, but hard to justify to admin
• Every team has faculty mentor, but students must
  be given only rough guidelines
• Monthly postmortems

24
Collaborative Projects

• Team leaders generally chosen by age/experience
• Everyone should have a chance to lead
• Goal is to learn, not to develop a game
• Must learn what you like, what youre good
  atthats what school is for

25
Collaborative Projects

• Dont expect grads to go straight to EA
• They learn business, entrepreneurship
• Expected to start small, and to expect it
• Supply of graduates will exceed demand

26
Collaborative Projects

• How to get students away from first-person
  shooters?
• Need to understand games are much broader
• But college is a chance to indulge ones
  proclivities
• Have students propose games, vote on top five,
  class does five projects
• Can combine them, as in Remission

27
Collaborative Projects

• Teachers love collaborative projects students
  dont and departments/administers dont
• Separate projects for separate classes?
• Very cool if you can spread it across, but you
  dont want one project for all the classes
• Need a balance of individual and collaborative
  work

28
Collaborative Projects

• How to get students to work toward a result
  anyone might want to buy
• Have an actual prospective customer critique and
  give feedback (requirements capture)
• Then company interns the group for a third year
  (after two-year project).
• Seek more crossdepartmental (art, music,
  programming) and even multi-institutional
  collaboration.

29
Game Library Whats a game library?

• Who thinks its
• old games for students to play?
• games students have made to show off to the
  public?
• code libraries?

30
Game Library Old games for students to play

• Whats the year of birth of your youngest
  student?
• Were they alive concurrently with Ronald Reagans
  presidency?
• Do they know that not all games were 3D?

31
Game Library Value in old-new games

• Atari PS3/XBox360/Wii
• Old games were made by one person (design, art,
  programming), in assembly
• Simplicity of design can have value
• Dig Dug is still fun
• Try game genres outside of what they would buy
• new experiences

32
Game Library Why did certain games succeed?

• Pac-Man, Starcraft, Tetris, Chess, Elite, WOW,
  GTA3, Unreal Tournament, Doom, etc.
• What gave them fanatics?

33
Game Library What games failed?

• Should they play ET?

34
Game Library Warning

• Make all students cancel their WOW accounts at
  the start of the semester

35
Game Library How can students show-off their
games?

• Online, playable Java applets
• Ref NYUs Ken Perlins homepage
• Downloadable EXEs
• Stony Brook Universitys CSE 380 homepage
• DVDs
• record gameplay
• good for console portfolios

36
Game Library And game code libraries?

• Is there documentation?
• Is there documentation?
• Is there documentation?
• Is there documentation?
• Is there documentation?
• Is there documentation?
• Is there documentation?

37
Game Library But seriously

• Decisions to make
• C vs C/Java
• Inside vs Outside the Game Engine
• Professional vs Self-made Game Engine
• Course code reuse?
• Game genre sample packs

38
Interdisciplinary Student Teams Issues
Strategies

• Human Communication Issues
• Internship program example
• Where students must work in teams and then build
  actual products
• Not as much communications as stereotypes and
  profiling as arty , geeks, and superpeople
  in their area
• Management is strategy to combat the profiling
  with appropriate assignments for them to work
  together and with questions that relate to the
  game and not to each other.
• 1/3 art 1/3 programming 1/3 story gameplay

39
Interdisciplinary Student Teams Issues
Strategies

• Management Issues
• Trying to find artist that are willing to
  compromise on style
• Programmers hate UI but the game still needs it
• Numbers of students that start, find out that
  its not as much fun to build a game as to play
  it!, so there is attrition that needs to build up
• One environment in an academic environment that
  works is to build a non-credit club that allows
  for portfolio building.

40
Interdisciplinary Student Teams Issues
Strategies

• Publishing the game encourages a focus on the
  game http//www.gamecreation.org
• Producer is firewall that assists in negotiation
  between differences.
• Short time frames force decisions
• Programmers have the POWER since they determine
  if something can be done, so programming is a
  bottom line for leadership.
• Creating real-world contexts over the project
  will encourage a focus to work together
• Ideas must be presented to the producer, then
  bounce back for feedback from the team, then
  final defense with the Producer.

41
Interdisciplinary Student Teams Academic Issues

• 5 students out of 15 do all of the work
• Multiple streams (art, programming, designers)
  have students in each team and the game is a
  result of the balance of the team in any semester
• Off site work can facilitate inter-institutional
  outsourcing
• Team teaching is a pain in the a_ _ but
  interdisciplinary requirements require equal
  expertise on the faculty
• Portfolio Credits is an incentive for both
  faculty and students (publish or perish and job
  portfolio)

42
Interdisciplinary Student Teams Academic Issues

• You cant force a student to care
• More difficult to see free-loading in
  programming, but it does stand out in the art and
  audio.
• Bring in professionals to help with SCOPE issues
• How do you pass off responsibilities to students
  who have no experience with management?
• One suggestion for many issues is to be the fly
  on the wall and make sure the faculty knows what
  is going on, and how people are interacting.

43
Interdisciplinary Student Teams Academic
Administration Issues

• Silos of interdisciplinary talent
• Credit distribution and department ownership of
  tuition dollars
• Faculty time or course release time
• Solutions would be Provost Level
  interdisciplinary majors
• Honors Programs for Capstone Experiences

44
Interdisciplinary Student Teams 2 Overview

• Amy Chaaban, Scott Roberts, Dana Wortman, Rodrigo
  Obando, Dani Castillo, Rob Martyn, Kathleen
  Harmeyer, Patrick Holmlund, Craig A. Lindley,
  Lennart Nacke
• Definition of interdisciplinary
• Case examples
• Conclusion

45
Interdisciplinary Student Teams 2 Definition

• Students level
• They have different majors
• Different kinds of people with different skills
• Inhomogeneous groups
• Everybody needs to feel equally invested
• Establishing a vocabulary
• Word values
• Extending the communication process
• Ranks against traditional bureaucracy

46
Interdisciplinary Student Teams 2 Cañada College

• Start with faculty
• Get them talking
• All teachers

47
Interdisciplinary Student Teams 2 Art Institute
of Washington

• Firing students in teams
• Team mates provide input for the grade
• Promote individual responsibility

48
Interdisciplinary Student Teams 2 DePaul
University

• Co-teaching with the industry
• Real-world approach
• Administration overhead as a problem

49
Interdisciplinary Student Teams 2 Waubonsee
Community College

• Small scope of projects
• Gaming club factors in
• Creating a class format from student projects as
  a major challenge

50
Interdisciplinary Student Teams 2 University of
Michigan-Dearborn

• Students get to pick
• Own projects
• Own team mates
• Coordinating between two different unis
• Teams meet beforehand

51
Interdisciplinary Student Teams 2 Uni Magdeburg

• Students have interdisciplinary major
• Computational visualistics
• Coordinate between
• Computer science
• Industrial design (arts)
• Have them as the coordinators in the projects

52
Interdisciplinary Student Teams 2 Högskolan på
Gotland

• Student projects very late in the program
• Organic process
• Students get to pick their teams in third year

53
Interdisciplinary Student Teams 2 Luleå
Technical University

• Courses start with a common frame
• Students get to pitch their ideas to each other
• Faculty assists in assigning teams
• Mentors from outside the University

54
Interdisciplinary Student Teams 2 University of
Baltimore

• Faculty members make the teams
• Connection between team members does not work
  well
• Differences in performance
• Bottom groups need more teacher input

55
Interdisciplinary Student Teams 2 Conclusion

• Individual programs have different requirements
• Experience in both types of teams
• Not necessarily in the same class
• But common curriculum
• Use of tools for communication among team members
• Blogs, forums, subversion, etc.
• Progressive team sizes

56
Competitions and Festivals as Learning Objectives

• Expos
• Able to make contacts within the community
• Discuss real-life experiences from industry
  professionals
• Demonstrates PR, business/management principles
  (e.g. e-business), organizational skills
• Example G2Expo (www.g2expo.com)
• Clubs
• Builds community, sharing skills/ideas, learn
  game history/genres
• Game Jams/Competitions/Paper Design
• Some of the best artwork comes from students who
  are put on a timeline it becomes a catalyst for
  creativity
• Promotes team-building encouragement
• Emphasizes problem-solving testing of designs
• Provides real prototyping experience
• Game Jam Circuit leading to a GDC award
• Introduce students into a professional
  environment
• Builds a better connection between academics and
  industry and between schools
• Multiple competitions/awards that focus on
  different areas