Adobe have started a free online course for young, creative students. Aimed at students between the ages of 14-19 who would like to be games designers, animators, video artists, or photographers.
The course is 2.5 hours a week for 10 weeks and students receive Adobe certification at the end. They also get a 90 day free trial of the Adobe Creative suite.
Find out more here:
http://www.adobegeneration.com/
Scratch is rapidly becoming the application of choice for introducing the basic ideas of programming in the form of creating animated games.
The team at MIT have now released details of the next version. An interesting one is the ability to create your own blocks – i.e. creating your own functions or subroutines. Have a look at the You Tube video below for more.
Microsoft have made efforts to introduce an educational game-making system into their popular 360 Xbox machine. It is called Kodu. This is their intro paragraph…
Kodu provides an end-to-end creative environment for designing, building, and playing your own new games. The core of the Kodu project is the programming user interface. The language is simple and entirely icon-based. Programs are composed of pages, which are broken down into rules, which are further divided into conditions and actions. Conditions are evaluated simultaneously..
Initially I thought it was a purely Xbox effort according to this link.
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/kodu/
It has to be more general than that surely?
But on that page there is a link on the right hand side that points to a ‘free PC version’
http://fuse.microsoft.com/project/kodu.aspx
This explains in general terms what is is all about. I wanted to see some real-world examples and at the bottom of that page can be found a link
This takes you to the personal game-making efforts.
On that page I clicked on the first example of a real game called ‘Kudo Turismo’. It was only a 39kb download, so obviously there must be something else needed to support that code. And indeed there was. On the left hand side is a link called Fuse-Labs download which is a 184Mb msi download. The version I downloaded was 1.0.48.0.
I clicked on the msi file and it said I did not have the XNA Framework installed. It offered a link to download and so I clicked on that. The XNA install started and then it wanted to install Directx 9.0c components as well.
Do you ever get the idea that some software is a virtual Matryoshka doll? Each one requiring their own additional bits of software?
After all that, the KoduSetup.msi did install and played the .kodu game I had downloaded. It did hint heavily about the Xbox controls that would drive the game, although the good old keyboard arrow keys also did the job. The graphics and sounds are very good though.
So all in all – it did the job. But the caveat is that you must have the right environment installed on the PC network to support it… Directx 9 -> XNA ->Kodu setup.
If you want to enthuse your students in computing via game-making then perhaps the effort of setting up the right environment might be worth it.
With the explosion of ‘apps’ for the iPhone, Cirencester College has recognised that there is a huge demand for iPhone programmers in this country.
To that end they are putting together BTEC, IT and A level modules to show students how to build apps and games.
This is an example of how education organisations need to keep a constant eye on the IT industry to ensure that young people learn the most relevant skills at the time.