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*).

Plasma screen

*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?