Mr.J’s Blog!

The end of the semester has come around and my students have submitted their work and moved to their next electives.  I now have a new group of students - which I am quite excited about as I will be able to build on what I have done so far.  It seems like the perfect time for a reflection on the semester, so here goes!

I have been teaching programming for 18 years and have been using games in the classroom for about 10 years.  However, this is the first year I have implemented a course like this.  For me, it’s all about engagement - and this course has hit the mark!  I wanted to give them an experience as close to one that they would have working as a games developer (in a classroom and in 6 months)! 

Students took a while to come to grips with C# (and XNA) but they did - with lots of help and examples.  I had to write a lot of material, and in many cases was doing this a lesson or two in advance of the class (as you sometimes have to do as an IT teacher)!  Students were very excited about programming for the XBOX360 and this has also helped drive them through ‘the tough times’.  Having said that, by limiting the course to 2D arcade type games and giving the students lots of examples, it wasn’t as difficult as I imagined it might be.

Teaching C# has definite benefits.  It is a close cousin to C++ which my students will come into contact with later on if they select an IT course.  It has also continued the development of my students for VCE Software Development 3/4 - where the ability to manipulate and write code is required.

I had the students form mini ’game-companies’ of 3 or 4 students.  Within these groups, there have generally been students who have designed all of the sprites / graphics, students who have done the menus and the infrastructure coding and those that have had the skills (and interest) in coding the game mechanics.  I think I can formalise this structure better by informing students about what types of skills are best to have in each group.  I asked the groups to create their own logo, which each group then included on the splash screen of their game.

I am going to upload some screen captures from the completed projects - so these will give you an idea of what they have done.   

This is an example of a program that has been written by a group of students adapting the tutorials that I gave them at the start of the semester, which in turn were based on the 2D tutorials on the XNA Creators Club site.

The cannon that was fixed in the bottom left hand corner of the screen can be moved freely around.  In addition, although it is hard to see on the image above, the enemy UFOs drop bombs.  The explosion effect is pretty impressive and utilizes some nifty particle code.

Another group of students has created a great Space Invaders clone.  The enemy space ships do speed up quite a lot towards the end and the frequency of their bombs increases - which makes it quite challenging!

In each of the blog posts that I write, I like to share my thoughts on topics that are current or making an impact on my teaching / life as an IT professional.  Sometimes I have a bit of a rant and other times, what I say is very considered.  However, in the past few weeks I have had meetings with more than 1 person that has told me that they read something interesting on my blog.  In some cases these have been people that I have not met before.  There is a saying that most of a first impression is made in the first thirty seconds of meeting someone.  Perhaps in this new digital age, we should amend this saying somewhat?

Everyone has a digital identity.  Like it or not, it is out there and people do get an impression of you (both personally and professionally) via the www.  The media is full of examples of employees who have been laid off after aspects of their social life have intruded into the workplace via the web.  For each one of these examples, imagine the number of times when employees have been passed up for promotion, applications for positions have been turned down or private lives have been exposed negatively and the story has not made the news.  References and referees on job applications are worth so little these days – as most employers will Google their job applicants to gain a real impression of who they are.  I have heard of cases where applications have not been shortlisted based on inappropriate images on FaceBook or MySpace pages.  Sometimes these decisions are simply based on the friends that someone lists on their page.  A person’s photo and bio may be quite acceptable, but add a couple of photos from linked friends with images of them drinking or appearing irresponsible, and it becomes a situation of ‘guilt by association’.

Digital identity is something our students both understand and fail to comprehend at the same time.  Discuss digital identity with your students and you will discover that it is something that comes with the territory of growing up.  It is infused with who they are and who they would like to be.  They create their own spaces, communities, links and web presence and yet they do not comprehend the ways in which what they say and do could affect them now and in the future.  My current Year 12 students were born around 1993.  They are the oldest students in the school and yet they have never not known the Internet.  They have grown up with connectedness and yet they lack a good understanding of the dangers of the Internet and the importance of digital identity.  This is an area where we need to do more.  We do much to spread the message about cyber-safety and cyber-bullying – now is the time to bring digital identity to the fore.

It is said that you never get a second chance to make a first impression.  Should we also be saying ‘you never get a second chance to make a first digital impression’?  If a first impression is made within the first thirty seconds, is a first digital impression made in the first 30 Google results? 

If you don’t make a habit of ‘Googling’ yourself, perhaps you should.  The ways in which my identity manifests itself on the www never cease to surprise me.  Sure, my web page features and booksellers that are distributing my books for example.  VITTA obviously features prominently, but what often surprises me is the links that will appear to mailing list posts that have been archived on web-sites or when others have mentioned my name within their own posts.  A comment that I placed into a feedback form on a web-site appears – totally unrelated to my professional life.  Depending on how you have various profiles configured, you may also get hits from Ebay, Yahoo groups or other online communities that you belong to.  Move over to Google images and you may be able to find a photo of yourself. 

The topic of digital identity is one for now.  Talk about it with your students whenever you have the chance.  There will always be stories from the media to spark the conversation and students will no doubt be able to relate their own perceptions and experiences.  You can always Google yourself in class as a demonstration – but (like all good teachers), you will already know the answer to the question! 

It would be fair to say that this semester has been one of ups and downs.  Overall it has been an extremely rewarding experience and I do think that my class in Semester 2 will benefit from all of the pitfalls that my Semester 1 class has encountered. 

I have students in roughly three categories at the moment.  I have a group of students that are flying in terms of their understanding and the development of their major game project.  In many ways this group has been challenging me in terms of their own needs - as I try to stay one step ahead of them and in many instances, not managing to get away with it!  This is where the teaching of IT presents it’s own unique challenges in that there are some many software types to learn and the depth at which we need to learn how to use them can be tricky to guage.  This group has an excellent grasp of C#, OO concepts, etc. and are creating code on the fly based on their own needs.

The second (and largest) group in the class are those students that are getting by using my code examples, adapting them and creating their own projects using these resources and others from the Internet.  Their level of understanding is good but not deep.  However, the projects they are creating are impressive.  Could they have created these projects without referring to the examples and tutorials that I have created?  Most probably not - but their understanding of C# is progressing and given more time, they would attain a level of independance that would allow them to do this.

The last group (thankfully only quite a small number) are those students that are struggling with the basics of C#.  I do acknowledge that this is the group I would like to do the most to address next Semester, and I think that this task will be easier given the amount of resources that I have created now. 

Very soon I will start transferring student’s work to the XBOX360 - I have already set up one in the back of the classroom for this purpose (connected to a large plasma screen that the Science department donated*).

*The Plasma screen has a black vertical line down the middle of the screen about an inch wide.  After about 15 minutes it disappears (there must be some component that needs to heat up or is overheating).  I might be able to find a solution to this on the web?

Well the end of Term 1 has finally come around.  I thought it would be a good time to look back at how my Game Design class has progressed with C# and XNA…

The first few weeks of the term were tough.  I had written a few tutorials - translating some of the content from the MS XNA Beginner’s Tutorials here.  Students started working through these tutorials and some were rushing through them much quicker than I expected.  Others were getting stuck with understanding the structure of an XNA / C# program, variables and constructs, etc.  This was very difficult as I was also trying to get my head around these concepts at the same time as trying to stay one step ahead of those that were finishing the tutorials that I had produced.

The general level of understanding of students during this time was poor.  The learning curve was a steep one and students were getting very little rewards for their efforts.  Their programs were almost impossible to debug as they were not familiar enough with the language and the interface.  However, it didn’t take long for things to turn around.

Once students had worked through the tutorial (in fact in many cases, even before they had finished), they started modifying the code and producing their own versions of the game described.  I decided to set this as the first mini-project and from this point on students flourished.  Students were creating versions of the tutorial game that I had not envisioned and many were very creative.  Many were still developing these mini-projects at the end of term despite the fact that we had moved on in the theory from the tutorial to some specific skills. 

Just prior to the end of Term 1, I produced my own mini-game called ‘Fozzie’s Banana Flip’.

By building this project up, I was able to demonstrate a number of additional skills to students such as sound, animation using sprite maps, collision detection, keeping score and randomisation.

The work that students are doing is really great and they are genuienly disappointed when the bell rings at the end of each class.  My aim is to get them started on their major projects with a view to porting these on to an XBOX360 at the end of the semester for play-testing.  I also aim to create a disk of all the games - it’s just a pity I can’t create an actual XBOX360 disk due to the security features of disks.

Increasingly I have begun to get a little tired of the use of the ‘Web 2.0’ catch-phrase.  It’s not that Web 2.0 tools are not great – in fact many of them are.  However, I also think that many of them are not really that useful in an educational context.  Often they expose students to unmoderated environments teeming with inappropriate advertising and dubious content.  For me, it is all about engagement.

One of the primary tasks in evaluating any Web 2.0 content should be a determination about whether the use of the tool will serve to enhance the engagement of students within the context of the course.  I currently have a student teacher who has been teaching a number of my classes and I find myself using the word ‘engagement’ an awful lot in discussions I am having with him.  Without me knowing it, it has become my ‘word’ of 2009 (at least until I change my mind)!  Watching someone else teach my classes has made me wonder how engaging the tools and delivery methods I use are?  Are forums engaging to students?  If used in the right way, with the right amount of prompting and moderation – absolutely.  As are wikis, blogs, podcasting, online collaboration and many other Web 2.0 tools.  However, the byline to last year’s conference (which struck a chord with me then and continues to), is particularly relevant.  Technology alone cannot save us.  The use of technology for technology’s sake is counterproductive.

Take Twitter for example.  Now I know that there are many of you who use Twitter and love it.  I was open to using it and have played around with it for a few months now.  However, I struggle to come up with an educational application for it – especially one that would engage students in just the sorts of ways that I would like to.  I remain to be convinced and perhaps someone out there can set me straight?  Flickr is cool but I rarely use it in class.  Google Maps and street view are also a lot of fun and have certainly fueled some good IT ethics discussions – but again I struggle to find an application for my own classes. 

I certainly welcome any nifty ideas or resources that anyone cares to move in my direction – and despite how the paragraphs above sound, I will give anything a go.  Did I mention that it is all about engagement?

At the end of last year, I decided that I would change the programming language that my Yr.10 Game Design class was using to Microsoft XNA.  For the last several years, they had been using both Dark Basic (which was really good for 3D stuff) and GameMaker.  At the conclusion of a student folio, in which students worked through exercises in both packages, they formed teams and worked on a major project using one of them.  This worked reasonably well, but I was looking for more ways to engage students and opportunities to make the subject more interesting.

The answer presented itself a couple of years ago, when I had a couple of students complete their major project for Game Design using XNA.  I had to set up a separate computer for them, as our lab computers lacked the graphics grunt required.

I thought about using it for a while, but one of the major stumbling points for me was teaching students C#.  Many years ago I had tried to teach a C++ course which failed - mainly because of the learning curve.  The lure of XNA and the resources that are already available on the www and elsewhere was the tipping point - and I thought that for 2009 I would give it a really good go!

I plan to update this blog with my experiences as I deliver this course and produce course materials, etc.  I will try and upload some photos and embedd some video as well.

VITTA’s ICT week has just concluded as I sit down to write this – and so it is probably a good opportunity to reflect on the past week, the ICT Careers Expo and the state of the ICT industry.

ICT week is now in its second year and has gone from strength to strength.  It has now become a National event and the ICT Careers Expo (as the flagship event of the week) continues to be successful.  Many of you have gone out of your way to organize events for the week and have either promoted the Expo or attended with your students.  However, this week is just one of the ways in which we can redress the recent downturn in our enrolments. 

One of the key messages that we wanted to deliver during the Expo was the state of the job market.  Many students are not aware of the opportunities that exist.  Of more concern is the attitude of parents towards the industry – and many of them still believe that the industry is suffering the aftereffects of the ‘dot-com’ crash. 

In Victoria, the ICT industry now generates over $24 billion dollars per annum.  It exports over $1.8 billion and employs over 85,000 people.  Nationally, the figures are much more impressive than this.  The growth of the industry is evidenced by an increase in the number of ICT jobs in Victoria – which has grown by over 40% in the last four years (over 24,000 new jobs).  I have these figures available (together with the national figures) in a presentation available on the VITTA website for you to download – which I would encourage all of you to do.

Slowly but surely we are breaking through the stereotype of the nerdy guy sitting in a basement glued to an LCD monitor for many hours of the day.  The reality is that the ICT industry is incredibly broad, spanning most other industries and encompassing a wide range of specialties.  Add to this the possibility of world travel, great pay, flexibility, a wealth of job opportunities.  You don’t have to act like a used car sales-person to sell this to your students – in fact, it’s amazing that they are not beating down our doors!

Late January is often a time when I reflect on my performance in the classroom the previous year and think about what I might do differently.  During the last few years, I have been determined to try at least one new technology ‘thing’ and see what effect it has on my classroom teaching.  Last year, I made a concerted effort to get my students involved in wikis, and I podcasted all of my Year 12 Software Development theory classes.  Did it have an effect?  I’m not sure what the best way of measuring this would be – however, the majority of my students really got into the wikis and many had my podcasts on their ipods and were listening to my theory classes as part of their exam preparation.    I had hoped for one of my senior students to achieve a perfect study score – but this did not happen (maybe this year?).  Although I was disappointed about this at first, the performance of my whole class put this in perspective for me.  I have always had large senior classes and last year was no exception.  However, for the first time 78% of the students in my class achieved a study score over 40 (placing them in the top 8% of the state).  Was this due to the changes that I had made?  I taught the course in roughly the same way as I usually do – so possibly.  Perhaps the biggest effect was on those students on the fringes – who were able to access content from my classes in a number of different forms and take some time to understand and interpret it?  It’s all speculation really, but having had the initial success with these tools – I will keep on using them as they (and my teaching) evolves.  

So what’s new on the horizon for this year? 

 I know teachers and students around the world have been vodcasting for some time, but this year I will begin my first foray into this (sometimes trivial) genre.  I have decided to make use of TeacherTube and upload videos for my classes (and anyone else who is interested) to make use of.  Depending on how that goes, I will possibly get some of students to do the same (I had an idea for some student panel discussions – but it remains to be seen as to whether I can interest them in doing it). 

I also plan to make use of some student blogging using the excellent Edublogs web-site (of which you are no doubt familiar with!)

 If you haven’t seen the thought provoking video clip created by Michael Wesch titled ‘A Vision of Students Today’, then I suggest you seek it out and have a look.  In it, Michael explores the landscape of the modern classroom, our place in it and the ways in which students are engaged (or otherwise).  With so many things competing for the attention of our students, we need to be both resourceful and willing to embrace new and interesting tools in order that we can compete.  However, the video does not preach that we need to adopt these technologies or risk not engaging our students.  We could certainly all create MySpace and FaceBook pages and chat with our students on MSN – however, this would not necessarily give us a better chance of creating a dynamic learning community.  In actual fact, launching ourselves full tilt into these domains so heavily populated by digital natives could make us look like we are trying too hard.  There may be no argument that the ‘digital natives’ are the masters of the technology, and we are ‘on the fringe’, however, they are not the masters of their own learning.  This is where we can place ourselves – and we can do so effectively by utilising those technologies that we can reasonably harness in the time we have available and in the context of what we are trying to achieve.   

So why aren’t students doing IT?  This is the question that has perplexed many of us as the current trend of declining enrolments at our respective schools continues. 

Certainly many of us have invested a great deal of energy in promoting our courses and introducing innovation and interesting programs like game design and animation into the junior and middle years.  Industry demand is high for IT graduates and job prospects are plentiful.  We have all tried to deliver the message – but it doesn’t seem to be working.  So what is the answer?

When I was elected to the position of VITTA President almost a year ago, I was determined to try and address this issue in a number of ways.  By developing stronger links with partners like the Australian Computer Society (ACS) and Multimedia Victoria, we were able to start producing materials to promote ICT careers.  The inaugural VITTA ICT Careers Expo was held at Xavier College and was attended by all the major stakeholders.  Student attendance was good – but below what we would have liked.  However, it was the first year of the event and as the flagship event of VITTA’s ICT Week, we are committed to building it up in 2008 and beyond.

There has been some criticism of the current VCE IT courses.  As one of the members of the writing team for the current course, I stand by its structure and content.  We were very aware of the falling IT enrolments and of the need to build in interesting and varied tasks.  We also built in tasks centered on career pathways. I feel strongly that the VCE IT courses need to have academic rigor and students expect this to be the case. But still VCE enrolments have continued to decline.  However, I would contend that this is not as a result of the content of the VCE IT study design, but rather one of a lack of student IT career pathways.

I feel strongly that clear student IT pathways will help address this issue.  For this to happen, the tertiary providers need to come on board.  At present, none of the tertiary providers list either of the VCE IT studies as a prerequisite.  Worse still, some stakeholders have suggested they prefer to have students enter their courses with no secondary IT experience, as they have to ‘unlearn’ students who have done a VCE IT study. At the same time, these very stakeholders have been beating down our doors to organise information sessions with our students to promote their courses, as their own enrolments have been declining in line with ours.

Imagine if the tertiary providers listed the VCE IT studies as prerequisites to their own courses?  Alternatively, perhaps undertaking a VCE IT course could earn a student course credits?  If the tertiary providers do not feel our VCE or middle school courses have vigour, why not get involved in writing teams and focus groups to produce resources and course materials?

The challenge has been made – a coordinated approach to this issue will help all of us in the long run and may well be a large part of the solution.