Hi Jake,
Thanks a lot for taking the time to record the screencast. It was good 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, to do anything else, we have to actively scavenge here and there, an hour away from producing and testing learning material. It was important for me to set aside enough time to give this conversation the attention it deserves. I have a strange feeling it’s an exchange we will look back on in time.
First things first, I’d like to gift you the program Learn 2D Gamedev. It’s yours to keep, regardless of whether or not your school signs up for the program. This is just a “Thank You” to you as a person for all the calls you made that brought you here:
- Looking to teach gamedev to your students with an open source engine that couldn’t lock them in. While it looks like it won’t matter much for most of them, for some, it could empower them to grow to read and understand the tools they use and even grow to modify or build on them in the future.
- Setting out to identify new learning resources and taking action by reaching out to me.
- Sharing your experience generously even before knowing if you will be able to use GDQuest’s program. To show, explain, invest oneself in the uncertain betterment of something: those are all hallmarks of genuine educators. It’s something we live by yet somehow witnessing it in others never gets old.
- Finally, there’s going beyond the immediate scope of your work to negotiate costs and try to get approval and funding for the sake of your students.
Even if we can’t change our pricing for one school for obvious ethical reasons, I still want to say I appreciate what it means that you somehow also worry about that.
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.
Here are your temporary credentials to log in on:
to change this temporary email to one you have access to.
You’ll notice, the platform uses multiple tools and components to facilitate learning:
Study guides (indicated with SG in the lesson navigation bar): those guides are mini crash courses that fall outside the immediate scope of the curriculum. They aim to put all students on the same denominator regardless of the classes they’ve taken and their level of confidence in the concepts required to understand a lesson. For example, if one student is comfortable with vectors because they took high school physics and another has not yet, these study guides give them enough of a practical synthesis on vectors to be able to follow along in gamedev.
In-lesson Callouts (indicated with the icons: “?” and “!”). Those preempt frequently asked questions and troubleshooting points respectively. They are based on a pattern of pain points and student questions we’ve identified in the process of supporting thousands of learners worldwide. They also serve to keep the focus on the main taught concept while still providing answers to questions that could come up. Depending on the nature of the point, these accordions may be open or closed by default.
Glossary Asides and Glossary Entries (indicated with the little dictionary icon). As their name indicates, those tools define new concepts and terms both contextually as they come up in a lesson, as well as in a searchable repository of knowledge. A quick look through those will easily allow you to see they’re far from generated definitions. They are extensions of the lessons, specifically crafted for practical gamedev learning and made directly relevant to the concepts taught in the program. They are searchable and may also contain callouts for questions and links to related terms.
Expert advice/Teacher’s bubble (indicated with an avatar and a speech bubble). This component of the platform aims to put students at ease by frequently reminding them that their learning journey is guided. They’re not on their own even while going through an assignment at home. In gamedev, we’ve found that one of the major hurdles is learners becoming overwhelmed and loosing steam when they don’t instantly see the big picture. These bubbles help reassure them and give them the confidence it takes to push through the organized chaos until every piece of knowledge and skill settles into its place in the larger fabric.
Gamedev Trivia asides (indicated with the lightbulb icon and “Did you know?”). This component of the gamification gives texture to the learning journey. It provides students with bits and pieces of information that they can choose to skip or collect. If they choose to read them, they’re let in on a little bit of information that most people don’t know. This too serves to build confidence in the subject matter by giving students the feeling of acquiring erudite knowledge.
Godot Tours. You can find them in Module 2 of the 2D program. Those are guided interactive lessons based directly in the game engine and aimed at providing familiarity with the engine UI and the workflow. They’re an innovative edtech we’ve developed in-house. A year of testing has revealed them to be extremely powerful learning tools in terms of speed of assimilation and information retention. We’ve recently released 3D ones as well. They help immensely with teaching.
Interactive Godot practices (indicated in sections called “Practice Makes Perfect!”). Those are validated gamedev exercises tested directly in the Godot editor. With the help of another GDQuest edtech, when students complete these projects and run their code, their mini game is tested live in a dedicated panel that gives them hints and a comparison between the outcome of their project and a demo of the solution. When they
Challenges. Those are suggested exercises with tiers of optional hints. They are ideal candidates for assignments that students can submit for teacher review. They’re aimed at applying the concepts learned in the lesson and going one step further to really own the new skills acquired.
Practical Experiments indicated in sections called “Try this on your own”. We found that the success or failure to build a habit of experimentation can make or break the learning journey in this discipline. Still following a gradual release of responsibility model, we use this component to nudge students to try some things in the editor and learn to form a hypothesis about the outcome.
Informal interactive quizzes (indicated in sections called “Try answering this”). Those are validated MCQs that serve to occasionally refresh memory or invite students to think and make an educated guess about a concept we will teach immediately afterwards. They are not intended to be used by teachers as skill checks. Rather, they highlight points of student participation and engagement in theoretically lessons.
Learn-by-teachingClass Q&A. Aside from privacy, one of the reasons we placed each school on its own instance of the learning platform is to encourage teachers to implement an internal system of learn-by-teaching. Students earn points when they ask a genuine question and when they answer another student’s question. The lesson Q&A moderated by the teacher is itself a teaching tool meant to simulate the online developer communities and forums students will eventually go on to participate in.
Using a combination of all these tools, throughout the program, we regularly weave technical learning with “learning how to learn” so your observation on this point felt honestly rewarding.
Anyway, I hope going through Learn 2D Gamedev and exploring the platform will give you a feel for what we’re up to and where our hearts and priorities are.
By design, what you’ve called student view will remain the main focus of the platform for a long time. GDSchool is designed to encourage intrinsic motivation and peer support.
Coming up in the future, as Godot continues to grow, we plan to leverage its upcoming web editor to add another valuable edtech to the platform: GDPen. It’s a code sandbox we’ve prototyped and that will enable us to integrate explorable explanations directly inside lessons without the need to switch back to Godot. Much like in
, students would be able to see a code snippet on one side and its visual game outcome on the other. Modifying the code would allow them to observe changes directly in the browser.
This brings me to teacher tools. The direction we plan to develop GDSchool in the future is not likely to include classroom management tools nor student progress tracking metrics. We feel the development of learning management systems to be a different line of work altogether and not one we’re currently invested in. Instead, teachers can freely integrate GDQuest’s curriculum into any LMS they already use, whether it’s Google Classroom, Canvas, Schoology, etc... Schools and districts that use Clever can independently add GDSchool to their dashboard for SSO.
Rather than classroom management features, once we’re out of early access, we are more likely to allocate time and resources to teacher guides:
Module-by-module teacher notes/manual with recommendations on pacing, assignments and progress gauging.
Suggested pooled scoring system aimed at gamifying class progress as a whole. Rather than testing knowledge, the system is rigged to encourage intrinsic motivation and peer support. When everyone learns, the class as a whole benefits. Individual students earn keys for the class by helping each other and making sure no one is left behind unable to complete a practice or project. The system is meant to foster a healthy developer mentality, encourage knowledge sharing, and form individuals who can go on to become ethical members of the digital community, able to seek information and exchange knowledge with peers. After all, that is how the tech community progresses.
Suggested Class Jams with provided asset libraries
Access to a GDQuest asset library
A student project showcase
I hope this gives you more visibility and helps you plan for your school.
As for giving your students access to single courses, they would have to sign up as individual students in the public instance of GDSchool. The price of each course would be $100 (USD) for lifetime access. They would be able to that a 15% student discount. It may be a solution when schools won’t fund the tools but parents would.
Once again, thank you very much for taking the time to share the screen recording with me.
Have a good day and feel free to ping me antyime.
Nathan
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