In today's blog post, I'll give some highlights for my three courses. This will be shorter than in some previous years, so I'm condensing it all into one.
CS315: Game Programming
I'm excited to be teaching game programming again, since this year we actually did get new machines in the lab—machines that are capable of running UE4. Last Fall's course went well, and so I am keeping most of the plan as-is, but trying to keep a pedagogic eye on how I can use in-class examples and workshops to drive some of the lessons home. I expect that we will do three to four mini-projects followed by a larger team project. This year, I have dropped the achievements, since I think the course is already quite full of places where students can make meaningful decisions about what to pursue. I am keeping both the specifications grading and the project reports, both of which served their purposes last year. I have been tempted to set up some kind of team role system or other accountability system for the final project, to prevent the case where one student carries the rest, but I am still unsure how to do this; perhaps I should turn that question around to the students and have them contribute to setting the rules.
Here is the draft course plan. Only the first of the mini-projects is posted, but I expect to re-use my progression from last Fall, where we went essentially from 1D to 2D to 3D across three projects.
CS439: Introduction to Game Design
I do not have an immersive learning project lined up for this academic year. Instead, I am using the year to try to intentionally explore how I can integrate some of the work I've done through immersive learning into formalized Computer Science department offerings. One step in this direction is offering a version of my game design course—which I have taught for several years as an honors colloquium—as a Computer Science elective that anyone can take. The easiest way to do this was with our "seminar" course, although this is not ideal for marketing the course, since it still shows up in the catalog as a 400-level CS elective. Still, I look forward to teaching this and seeing how the audience compares to the honors colloquium.
One way that I have made this "computer science-y" is to require our intro programming course as a prerequisite. This is not because I expect to do much programming, but rather because I want to be able to draw upon metaphors of computational thinking when looking at games system design. This seemed like a good idea at the time, but I have questioned this the more I've worked on it. Indeed, in my random sketching of how I would consider proposing this as a formal service course in my department, I've strongly considered dropping any prerequisite.
As for the course structure, here is the draft course plan. It is based strongly on what I have done in previous years. Even though the examples in the free online text we use are showing their age, I like both the presentation and the price. Once students build a core vocabulary, they can make use of the exhaustive supplemental information that is discoverable online. Without a community partner via immersive learning, the students will be working on projects of their own design without external constraints, which I haven't done in a class like this since roughly 2008. I'm eager to see what they pursue. As before, we'll spend the first half of the semester studying fundamentals and then the second half of the semester building projects. Some of the students who have enrolled are ones with whom I really enjoy working, and so I'm looking forward to spending time with them again too.
CS445/545: Human-Computer Interaction
The last academic year, I taught this course both semesters in a collaboration with the David Owsley Museum of Art. I had a fruitful meeting with their education director several weeks ago as we debriefed the experience. I am glad to say that we are continuing our collaboration, but we are narrowing the focus toward one specific problem: helping visitors navigate the physical museum. This means that my students won't have to do so much problem discovery, but I think that's OK. They really struggled with the idea of finding a legitimate problem vs. inventing a problem and then justifying their work. I think this new focus will help them get into the solution design part of the course, which is really more important for our single, elective course on HCI.
Knowing that this will be a relatively low-enrollment class allows me to treat it as a studio class. We will start with some common readings and structured exercises, but then I would like to move quickly into tackling this navigability problem, using my familiar tactics of just-in-time teaching and reflective practice to have a meaningful learning experience. The draft course plan only lays out activities for the first three weeks or so of class, after which I can work with the students to assess our situation and move forward as needed. It does mean there is kind of a hole around the grading policy of the course, and I hope that this does not cause the students any undue stress. My plan is to work with them to develop a methodology that embeds assessments into it, which I think they will enjoy and learn from.
A word about the sites
Careful readers may have noticed that my course web sites have undergone a visual overhaul. This is related to my learning lit-element, as I wrote about earlier this summer. Whereas my sites were previously based on the polymer starter kit, now I am using the PWA starter kit prerelease. I had to do a bit of finagling to get it to work on our departmental Apache server, but once that was done, I could easily replicate it across the three sites.
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