Planning out my syllabi for courses has always been a tedious exercise. It all starts out well; for a new course, I look at the calendar for that semester, and start placing in my topics, labs, and exams. When I started out teaching, I prin…
And last, in this push of blog posts, an update on the Civic Hacking lab I revised earlier in the year. My colleagues tried it out in December as the final lab of our CS1 intro course, and while Jupyter Notebooks were again a hit with the s…
I was finally able to get in another visit in December to the Little Rock Game Designers to test out my Mardi Gras board game, as you can see below. This playtest went quite well even though we only got through two rounds. And based on the
I spent much of November coding up new card games in RECYCLE for my CardStock research project. I finally felt like I had enough diverse games to start analyzing and writing about what I’m learning by simulating them with AI players, and ha…
Just posted this over at LDJAM.com, it’s a post-mortem account of my creation of What We Hold In Our Hearts for Ludum Dare 43 back in December. This is my fourth Ludum Dare entry, and here’s how my numbers tallied up this time: And using th…
I’ve reached a milestone in my development of Bunny Kiss, finally laying out sensible levels for a tutorial, and it is ready for early playtesting! Here is a link to the prototype, if you get a chance to play, I’d love to hear your feedback…
My big goal for October is to complete a full game in Unity, with working tutorial, GUI, high scores, animations, particle effects, etc. Most games I have made have just been functional prototypes, so this will push me to refine all the ele…
Part of my sabbatical project is learning new game development skills, and one I’m really excited about is programming in virtual reality in Unity. After a bit of searching, I settled on getting an Oculus Rift Touch. It comes with a headset…
I was lucky to attend the Game Developers Conference in 2017 for the Education Summit. I learned about how other educators were approaching their courses, and the wider pathways for my students in pursuing graduate school in game developmen…
I spent most of September thinking about Fujisan. As I mentioned in an earlier post on board game designs, my friend James was interested in the percentage of random board setups that were solvable in his game, and I built a program to simu…
Hooray, my panel proposal for SIGCSE 2019 was accepted! I’ll be moderating a discussion about “Civic Engagement Across the Computing Curriculum” with Michael Goldweber, Matthew Jadud, S. Monisha Pulimood, and Samuel Rebelsky. We hope many a…
It’s been over a month since my last update. I’ve had my head down on some projects, but wanted to take some time today to make some posts on my progress. Here’s the first of a few. Voting is complete, and my entry Baggage Claim in Ludum Da…