Games Programmer Visits Games & Gaming SIG

Melbourne Games Programmer Sam Sauvage had plenty of expert advice for would-be games developers today.

Sam, from IR Gurus Australia’s leading multi-platform game development studio, visited the Games & Gaming SIG - and stayed on for the Games Programming C class.

Sam talked about career pathways for game developers such as:

• University Maths and Computing - particularly C++ and maths of polygons
• Academy of Interactive Entertainment - a one year course (Melbourne) almost guaranteeing employment in the industry - probably at IR Gurus
• Getting together a young multi-skilled team of passionate gamers

All options led to jobs in a very hardworking industry which Sam describes as becoming a lot like the film industry where teams of 50-100 people covering a wide range of skills work on multi-million dollar projects with tight deadlines.

Sam described the difference between developing games for PCs and consoles and talked about the huge demand for games programmers working on PlayStation 3 titles. He showed some sites related to games developed by IR Gurus and the games industry in general:

• AFL Premiership 2006
  
• Heroes of the Pacific
  
• Heatseeker
  
• Game Developers of Australia
  
• Krome Studios
  
• Assembly - for Demo writers
  

Game demos and modding were also good areas for students to get involved in because you learn basic skills and terminology for the industry.

Sam stayed and chatted with the Games Programming class and looked at some of the flash and GameMaker work being done. He hopes to come back - possibly to work with students on projects.

Thanks Sam - your time was greatly appreciated!

Keeping Up With Global Change

For the last three years HC teachers have been researching and discussing what it means to prepare students to live and work in the 21st century. The following recently produced video clips summarise some of those changes quite well.

The changing way we use technology.

The change from a network of machines to communities of people...

(Click once to activate window and then once to play.)

The changes due to globalisation.

(from a USA point of view)

This video was watched an estimated 2 million times in the last four weeks - many viewers were educators from around the globe.

The Changed Global Demography

Watch video

One of the most dynamic presentations on global statistics that you are likely to see. (Google has recently bought the software Trendalyzer used in this presentation.)

Year 11/12 teachers around the State - in both Government and non-Government schools - are currently examining the impact of these changes on the curriculum.

Multi-talented Multi-media Students

Some outstanding work already from this year's Multimedia students - and we have only just begun... We started the year setting up an online spaces to share tasks, student work and for assessment. We then jumped into Photo Story - creating digital stories from still shots. We used pictures we had taken or those from the FlickR Creative Commons site so that we can legally show them outside class.

We looked at techniques for adding text, clipping and panning. Here is a great example from Hannah using pics and audio from her band Majestik.

James put this one together on his laptop using sunrise photo's he took last year.

James also started some work stitching photo's together with Jade... Scott then took nine pics of our computer lab...

and made a great panorama from them.

Click in the window and drag the mouse left or right to look around the room... you can also zoom in/out... Some didn't overlap enough to get a good join but it shows what can be done...

Some students are now using Movie Maker to create more advanced photo-stories while others are working on short videos. Great work guys More examples later...

Games on Toast

Delicious wafts of raisin toast filled the air in the Games & gaming SIG this morning - so did some smoke when one piece was cooked twice... fortunately the smoke alarms were not triggered and we didn't send the whole building out into the rain

After a slow start due to blocked roads we went through 3 loaves of toast.

A gamers SIG Community has been set up on the HC Social Learning Network and several people joined up.

Members can post to the blog about the SIG or their gaming experiences or comment on existing posts.