To Do (2)

So, I was reviewing the To Do list I made two months ago and I've made pretty poor progress on it.  I got comfortable with about half of morse code before midterms distracted me from that and I only really managed to master one new origami pattern (a lily) but made significant progress on two others (the crane and the lotus flower).  As for all of the reading, I haven't had time.

So all of that will stay tentatively on the list with a few additions as follows:

5. Spring cleaning 

I'm already knee deep in this.  There's been a fair amount of dusting, vacuuming, and moving furniture, but major de-cluttering an reorganization are looming in my future.  I have difficulty with letting items with any nostalgic value go.  I'm working on this.

6. Learning my curriculum for camp

My assigned courses this year include Video Game Creation, Adventures in Game Design, and the RPG Design/Graphic Arts hybrid course, all of which use Multimedia Fusion Developer 2 (though the last incorporates Photoshop as well).  After teaching Fusion for three years, I'm pretty comfortable with it.  I really only need a little refresher before the season begins.

My difficulty comes with the new course I'm teaching this year, which is Game Design for the iPhone and iPad.  My Regional Manager keeps telling me that enrollment is high for this course and, having now just checked the Course Availability tab on iD's UCI location, it looks like he's been adding weeks where the course is available.  It's looking more and more like this will be the only course I'm teaching this summer, and to full classes as well.  @_@

Anyway, the course uses a program called Game Salad which, like Fusion, is an interface that allows non-programmers to build games.  I've been running myself through most of their basic tutorials and have found the interface to be somewhat less user friendly than Fusion.  On the flip side, it also feels like you ultimately have more control over the physics of the game.  So, on the whole, while I think you could probably turn out some pretty neat material in one week of camp with Game Salad, I'm not necessarily looking forward to teaching it to the more difficult 10 year olds that I will invariably be in charge of. 

Game Salad is a free program, by the way, and comes loaded with a variety of tutorials in case any of you are the type to try and play around with that sort of thing :)

7. Graduate

Yeah, that's happening soon :)  I'm walkin' the walk this Saturday.