What is it?
I felt so inspired from my Game Development courses at UF's Digital Worlds Institute that I volunteered to be a course assistant.
What I did:
I assisted with two game development courses. The Fall course focused on introducing first time game designers to making solo developed 2D games with Unity, while the Spring course was a cross disciplinary Digital Arts and Computer Science course focusing on creating complex games for showcase purposes.
Challenges and Solutions:
I developed a sample script repository and created YouTube tutorials to help introduce students to complicated game concepts such as Dialogues, Combat, Weapon and Inventory systems, and basic AI along with a starter package for 3D development.
I also answered students' questions and helped guide them in implementing features and fixing game breaking bugs and have passed down the repository to my instructor and friend Nick Heitzman to be built upon by the next Course Assistants. Lessons Learned:
I learned that in person tutorials were the best way to teach complicated topics, with the second best being video recordings that students could reference over again. I also had to tailor my work to include visual tools and components for students who were less interested in programming and more interested in design.
I learned that teaching these complicated topics early helped the students to grow faster by the end of the semester. By the second half of the advanced class, the students had decided to make incredibly unique projects and I was mostly just asked for implementation tips and to help fix bugs. |
My first YouTube tutorial
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