Hi Nathan,
I'm home and recovering, barely, but I'll make it. I had a big bike accident and I don't remember a thing. I have to wait for the police report to find out exactly what happened.
I have to have plastic surgery for my ear because it was damaged badly. I have to have speech therapy because my brain isn't talking well to my mouth. I have to have physical therapy, although physically I'm doing the best of all. I have a long road of recovery ahead of me.
I wasn't sure if I'd be teaching next year, but I think I will with plenty of time off this summer and rest.
I did want to address some of your concerns because interestingly enough, my mental power comes in fits and starts and it's firing now.
I see students for 2 years in a row. Almost always the exact identical students the second year, except a few who don't pass and drop out of school, or transfer. Transfers are rare because it's rare to transfer in the final year of school, but it happens.
I'm curious about something, if we enroll 70ish, new students each year, will they have course access for 2 years in a row? I see a total of about 140 students each year. 70 are second year students so they don't need to be re-enrolled and paid for again in theory. I guess it just depends on how you plan to handle it. For example, this year's juniors, are enrolled, and they will be my seniors next year, so next year, they don't need to be enrolled again,BUT my new juniors will need to be enrolled next year. If that's how it would work, then each year I'd need to pay and enroll for about 70 students.
I have a small budget for incidental exepenses, around $3000 per year, so I could manage that, $5 next year and then moving to $10 the year after that.
A couple of things though, my district is not small, we have about 52,000 students. I am one of only 2 game design teachers though. THe other, Daniel Owens, I put in touch with you earlier, but for some reason, he decided to stick with Unity again this year. Would you be able to hold the price per student at $10 a student for me?
Number 2, when we purchase things there is a whole vendor vetting that has to happen. It's a process and it can take LOTS of time. That department is short staffed and it can take months for the vetting to happen. I wouldn't say they are efficient either. For example, Minecraft EDU is blocked by our district because it's never been vetted before. As you know, in EDU there are federal and state mandates that need to be accounted for and followed to the letter. I have never in 20 years asked them to vet a vendor, and I get the feeling that it's easier to just find free solutions, that you use without vetting, to get around this mandate. It's not that MinecraftEDU is unsafe per se, it's that Microsoft refuses to sign my district's privacy policy. It repeats that it complies with all state, federal, and local laws, so why should it sign individual policies. Which I kinda agree with. It's crazy. For example, in the Unity example, they gather WAY MORE personal information on students that you do, but because it's free, people have used it in the past without asking. It's not safer, it's not more educationally sound, it's not better, it is just easier to get around the restrictions. That is my only concern, the friction we might rub up against in doing it that way. That said, I love your curriculum, and it's way safer for students to use, so I'm willing to make an official ask for vetting.
There's a lot of details to work out, so it might be best to discuss this over the phone someday. Reading, synthesizing, and gaining new knowledge right now is hard for me, it's much easier to talk through things in my condition.
Short version
I don't think the price is unfair. I have the money and can do it.
I want to make sure we only have to enroll my 1st year students each year, capped at 70 students.
To pay, I'd have to have you officially vetted, which can take time. I can glean info and tell you what to say if you need it. I'd say something like we're based in Europe and due to GDPR we have stricter privacy standards so it shouldn't be hard for us to meet your criteria. I don't know if not being US based makes a big difference.
I'll be around all week if you have any thoughts to add.
Thanks.
Hi Owen,
This sounds absolutely horrible.
When you first told me you had a bike accident, my mind went more towards a knee scratch and maybe a broken rib. Not a blackout, upcoming plastic surgery and speech therapy!
I’m really sorry this happened to you. One day you’re fine and going about your life and the next day you’re on a long road to recovery. I wish you courage. It’s humbling that you’re able to think at all, let alone type out a well formulated reply that has your students’ best interest in mind.
I’m always hoping families have at least a sense of how much teachers in the U.S. can be personally involved in making more with less.
I don’t know how much you were involved in the discussions we initiated last year with the Godot foundation. We proposed dissolving GDQuest as a company and turning it into an NGO affiliated with the Godot Foundation and funded by it to deliver a free gamedev program using Godot. We mostly had public schools in mind.
We pushed for it for several months and brought all the decision makers to the table but it mostly fell on deaf ears. Probably not for want of care. Rather, the foundation was not ready to fund education yet. While it did seem they were getting more funding, they still felt it was necessary to put all of it back into engine development because that’s what donors donated for. Education gets brought up again every now and then, but nothing comes of it.
It was frankly depressing for a while but then we decided to pick up the pieces and try to do what we can on our own.
We pushed forward and evaluated carefully what we could still do sustainably as a social business to make the program as accessible as possible for schools.
That’s how we ended up with the pricing you see in the
.
It’s per student per year. So if you have a total of 140 students enrolled in a given year, it would be USD 1400 for that year regardless of whether they are returning or new students.
For private schools the price goes up to $50 per student per year.
Both logistically and ethically, we cannot handle pricing differently from school to school. Specifically in California, we already have a public school signed up for 2024 ( in Huntington Beach). Then there’s the San Diego unified school district in the pipeline.
I feel like it could be doable for your districts to collaborate with curriculum experts to approve the program at state level, like they do for textbooks. In that case, it would stay at USD 5 per student per year for the whole state and it hopefully wouldn’t have to come out of your incidental expenses budget.
Given the type, volume and detail of the material, the price should be very fair when compared to most physical and digital textbooks even if you give the average physical textbook 5 years of life.
Anyway, for now, it’s USD 5 because of early access.
We will do our best to support the vetting process. It actually went really fast with Huntington Beach. It seems the outreach deck was enough for them.
I’m around anytime to chat by voice. Please don’t feel like you need to type.
Meanwhile, I really truly hope your recovery is speedier than it must feel at the moment.
Gamedev aside, thanks for being the kind of human who cares despite a sudden health crisis.
Talk to you soon,
Nathan
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