Thoughts and Answers

In this section, we like to comment on today’s game topics, or just concepts of gaming.  OK, it’s just a chance to voice our opinion for gaming, but feel free to send us an email with your thoughts.  We may post them. 

The other thing that we do is answer your questions.  Since I teach gaming for Hagerstown Community College, I can answer a variety of technical questions.  I may not want to go into 5 pages of Variational Calculus, but I can take time to try to answer anything that you are having a hard time with, even software issues.

Old Topic Archive

Most Recent Topic - Gaming at Colleges

Since I work at a college, and I teach gaming there, I figured that I would do an in depth analysis of the experience. This will be a multiple week topic. I will publish the entire piece when it's completed in the "Old Topic Archive." Feel free to send me your thoughts.

This last section of our ongoing topic is going to address the complaints/questions that I’ve heard since teaching in gaming. Here are some:

2. My teacher doesn’t have a full background in gaming?

Sometimes I feel this is aimed at me.  I fell into gaming through the Serious Games route, running and coding finite element codes and graphics packages.  I never got to work on my “Mass Effect.”  So, I used to feel a little embarrassed when my students heard that I never worked for Bethesda or some other cool game company like that. 

However, what I do possess is a wide breadth of knowledge.  At a community college that is needed because in the spring semester I teach artificial intelligence, C++, Flash, some basic drawing, a modern 3D game engine like Source, a little 3DS Max, Object Oriented Programming, some computational geometry, Game Physics, game design, storyboarding, thumbnails, scripting, etc.  I’m not trying to show off here.  I can’t do even one of the aforementioned near the level of someone in industry.  Nonetheless, I would think that almost all in the industry would not be competent in teaching at least one of the above.

At smaller schools especially, teachers have to be flexible.  They can’t be only into 3DS Max or Maya (as an example), because that might only result in a couple classes a semester at best.  Industry people from big companies tend to be so specialized that they have to learn much before they can teach a full 15 credit or more load.  Smaller company employees may be more varied but usually have a niche that they fill, like being 2D only.

I hope I’m not sounding arrogant here.  Most of these people in industry are more valuable to their bosses than I am to mine.  It is just to become a teacher in this wide field, you have to have a wide background or learn much on the fly.  I had to get worse in a few areas in order to strengthen my others.

Therefore the reason teachers don’t have a full background is that they are often called to do more than one discipline.  Moreover, and the unfortunate part of my job, we never get very far in the development of the individual.  We have to teach many rudimentary lessons that they can expand upon in their projects.  I would say that around 25% of my time is spent on teaching on GUI’s and debugging.  I t would be great to go deep into the fray of gaming but those opportunities aren’t as prevalent as you think.

(9/11-2/12)