ScratchPaper

Tap into Free Help on Your Godot Projects

GDQuest Help Request Template

Owen SFUSD

FAQ Schools

Shanghai int'l school

Explore

Shanghai int'l school

Untitled page

Note: This is a chat conversation on Discord.

jstephens — 06/11/2024 8:55 AM

I am a computer science teacher and I started working through Learn GDScript From Zero. I wondered if there were any plans to create a teacher focused platform to create classes. I really feel like this is great and having something like this would really be well received. One I have used recently and really like is CMU CS Academy. If you are working on something like this and looking for volunteers to pilot, I would be very interested.

⁠

gdquest — 06/11/2024 12:02 PM

Hi,

We do have a platform that we're currently testing with a few schools. It's called GDSchool. In California, we currently have the San Francisco Unified School District following our program in Early Access.

Here are some details about the program and links to the outlines of the courses:

We offer free teacher copies for public schools that teach the GDQuest curriculum, which includes our 2D and 3D courses as well as upcoming courses dedicated to teaching specific game genres.

For public schools, the cost of the GDQuest programs is only 10 USD per student per year. Plus, as we're still in Early Access, it's exceptionally 5 USD per student per year. Once we're out of Early Access, the cost remains 5 USD only for schools or districts with over 1000 students.

If you're interested in signing up your school, we put together a deck that you can share with your school administration if you need help getting them on board: https://www.figma.com/proto/5s13hQ4AR3GZdN0VzFQxVz/Shareable-Schools-Deck?t=EA9wndfE3WdVilop-1&scaling=scale-down&page-id=0%3A1&node-id=615-4913

In the meantime, here's a direct link to GDSchool our learning platform so you can have a look around. The link corresponds to an example lesson in the latest module of the 2D course: https://school.gdquest.com/courses/learn_2d_gamedev_godot_4/telling_a_story/first_ui_exploration

And here are the outlines for the 2 courses currently in Early Access:

Learn 2D Gamedev: https://school.gdquest.com/outlines/learn_3d_gamedev_with_godot.pdf Learn 3D Gamedev: https://school.gdquest.com/outlines/learn_2d_gamedev_with_godot.pdf At the moment, we're at Module 7 of 19 of the 2D course and module 3 of of the 3D course. We're releasing learning material at the pace of 1-3 modules/month. As it is, the content has already shaped up to be extensive and well suited both for guided study in the classroom and for independent study.

Please let me know if you have any questions. Thanks for getting in touch and I hope to hear from you soon!

⁠

jstephens — 06/11/2024 12:56 PM

Thanks. I will check out these links and get back to you

⁠

gdquest — 06/12/2024 at 10:33 AM My pleasure. On top of questions, if you have feedback you'd like to share, it'd also be most welcome. Have a good day!

⁠

jstephens — 06/13/2024 at 4:20 AM

Thanks. My main question is whether there is special pricing for private schools. I teach at an international school in Shanghai. From talking to teachers in other subjects, it seems like pricing for subscriptions like this is generally 15 to 20 USD. I might be able to get approved for 25 but 50 seems pretty steep.

I also wondered about whether licenses could be transferred to different students at semester. I am waiting to hear what classes I will teach next year, but some of these will probably include some semester courses where the students would change at the semester. If we had to purchase licenses for each semester, that would be an obstacle as well.

My last thing would be that it is nice to see the student view, but it would be nice if there was a way to see what the teacher side of the platform would look like with some sample students in the course to get a sense for how things work.

⁠

gdquest — 06/13/2024 at 10:16 AM

Regarding pricing and transferring licenses, please allow me to check with my teammate and get back to you as soon as possible.

Regarding the platform, currently, we're gathering feedback from teachers to know what views and tools they would like to have. The teacher side currently is very similar to the student side: the school gets a dedicated instance of the platform with Q&A features gated to the school. The schools currently participating in the early access use their own systems for keeping track of student assignments and grades, so they didn't request that in priority. However, we're planning to add more features to the teacher side in the future based on the feedback and requests we receive.

You mentioned appreciating the CMU CS platform. If you still have access to it, would you mind sharing the teacher tools the platform offered that were most useful to you? If you have any other references or tools you like, I'd appreciate it if you could share them with me. This would help us understand what you're looking for in a platform and what we could improve or add to ours.

Thank you for your feedback and questions. I'll get back to you as soon as possible with more information on pricing and licenses.

Here are the answers to the remaining two questions:

Licenses are per person/seat per year, so absolutely, you can transfer them to different students per semester.

We offer 50% off while the platform is in early access. The price is $25 per license now and most likely throughout 2024, as we have a massive amount of content to produce yet.

After that, the planned price is $50 per license per year for up to 1000 students and $25 per year for more than 1000 students. To put the price in perspective, with the first two courses we're currently producing alone, you're looking at about 2,000 pages worth of textbook material, with more planned after that.

⁠

jstephens — 2024-06-17

Thanks for the info.

We are still in the process of assigning teacher schedules. I am not questioning the amount of content but the reality is most students will not cover that much in a school year. So maybe a per course cost. I will think about this more but in the long run I don’t think I can get approval for 50 per student. I will record a screencast of some of the features that are helpful. It is not a perfect platform but it is really well done. I will also mention JuiceMind who have created kahoot style quizzes that would be interesting to try to create. The last thing I would like to know more about is what assessments you are creating for teacher use or if that is up to the teachers. I will record the screencast most likely tomorrow and share it with you.

jstephens — 2024-06-19

Sorry. With the end of the school year it took me a bit longer to record the video than I thought.

⁠

https://concordiashanghai-my.sharepoint.com/:v:/g/personal/jake_stephens_concordiashanghai_org/EbIU7Rh7fjBCu1vLKqlmaL8Bf-RhiGxzIdzhVeOZ3vKg3w?nav=eyJyZWZlcnJhbEluZm8iOnsicmVmZXJyYWxBcHAiOiJPbmVEcml2ZUZvckJ1c2luZXNzIiwicmVmZXJyYWxBcHBQbGF0Zm9ybSI6IldlYiIsInJlZmVycmFsTW9kZSI6InZpZXciLCJyZWZlcnJhbFZpZXciOiJNeUZpbGVzTGlua0NvcHkifX0&e=o5j9qg⁠

⁠

Hi Jake, Thank you for taking the time to record the screencast. It was really helpful to see the tools you use in CMU CS Academy and what you think of them. Sorry it took me a while to get back to you. These days, we have to actively scavenge time away from producing learning material. GDQuest is tiny and we’d like it to stay this way. I’d like to share more about where the platform is headed by design and what you can and can’t realistically expect to find in it in the short to medium term. First things first though, we’re giving you personally Learn 2D Gamedev. It’s yours to keep regardless of what happens with your school. It’s just our way to say thanks for the recording and thanks for caring: - Getting to Godot in the first place and looking into teaching gamedev with an open source engine that couldn’t tie down your students

- Setting out to look for new resources for your students and taking action by reaching out to me

- Sharing what you know even before knowing if you will use the GDQuest. To show, explain, invest oneself in the betterment of whatever crosses our path: All reflexes that tend to land a certain category of people in this line of work.

- Finally, there’s even going beyond the scope of your work to do something absurdly expected of educators these days: Negotiating costs to try to get tools approved and funded for the sake of students. Even if we can’t change our pricing at the moment, I still appreciate that you ahve to thin of that too. I’ve taken the liberty to create a profile for you on GDSchool and I added the Learn 2D Gamedev curriculum to your dashboard. If you’ve already created a profile, and/or purchased Learn 2D Gamedev, please let me know what email you used as we would like to refund your purchase. Here are your temporary credentials for

school.gdquest.com⁠

⁠

username: jake.stephens@gdquest.org password: Uncertain$Papaya$Platypus7 After your first login, you can go into your

profile⁠

to change this email to one you have access to.

This should allow you to browse the platform, get to know its features, try the interactive Godot Tours as well as the in-editor exercises with live testing panel. Most importantly, it will give you an idea of how we mix and constantly intertwine the parts you refer to: technical learning and “learning how to learn”. I’ll write again soon to get back to you on our future plans for GDSchool and where we are set to allocate effort in the short to medium term. I hope this gives you a feel for what we’re up to, where our hearts are in terms of teaching and why the student view will likely continue to be the main focus for us for a long time. But more on that soon. To help you plan, as I understand the cost may be prohibitive for your school, I will go ahead and already let you know already that we won’t change the pricing for one school with respect to others for obvious ethical reason. As for the decision to price the program at USD50 at all, for private schools, it is inform

Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.

Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (

CtrlP

) instead.