[game_edu] Brenda Braithwaite's game_edu rant at GDC

[Bill Crosbie]

Anthony, you make a good point, but may I also point out that the three
years at university made you ready to excel in your internship. You weren't
doing the specific tasks of industry in school, but you were developing a
mindset to be effective. So the question we are grappling with here is how
to extend that kind of experience to everyone with the hunger to "go for it"
and to do so from the start of their design careers.

I love Jim's idea of going visual (gamemaker, processing) and providing real
projects. It reminds me of how I started coding (when you had to enter
source from the back of a magazine to play the games... yes...I'm old.)

What strikes me about Jim's approach is it starts with a real goal and
relies on the students to work to make the end result possible. It seems
that in traditional CS curriculum we start with small building blocks and
then if we have time, ask the students to try to assemble these pieces in to
a coherent whole at the end of the semester. We lose people along the way to
boredom or confusion. There is no framework to structure the individual
components and so each concept is seen in isolation from how it is used.

Or something like that.




On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 2:32 PM, Anthony Hart-Jones
<tony at dragonstalon.co.uk>wrote:


>    You may laugh, but apprenticeships might not be such a bad idea.  I

> learned more about design in a month of work than three years of

> university.  Take a kid with a good understanding of maths / mechanics and

> they'd learn more spending a year working in a games studio than a decade in

> academia.

>

>   As a friend of mine often remarks, your mileage may vary...

>

>

>

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