We've just had our annual games presentation day where students had the opportunity to present their work and interact with representatives from industry. It was a fun, laid back affair and the students got valuable feedback from the representatives.
Yesterday, I spoke to some students and got some feedback about the games course. Overall, they were happy with the course structure but they felt that there needs to be some changes in the actual topics in each subject.
The students would have liked to have had the chance to learn the following.
- The gritty bits of DirectX and OpenGL
- Networking
Other bits of feedback the students gave:
- Games Modding was an awesome subject thanks to Paul Taylor who lectured and tutored.
- It was a pain to learn IGL which is essentially a wrapper for Windows calls, calls which they learned in CGT
- CGT is still an awesome subject thanks to Zhen He.
- It was a pain to then learn Allegro after IGL, but Allegro is still useful so we'll keep it
- The fact that next year there will be third year game subjects in first semester is not bad because it provides room for students to work on their projects in second semester
- First year uni is well organised but second and third year become increasingly less organised.
I got a chance to ask people lots of questions. The following are some of the things that I picked up
- We have to pick a 3D engine to teach. I'm thinking Ogre
- I am really happed that there is a first year subject that covers key maths and physics concepts
- It is useful for students to learn 2D in second year.
- In third year students should gain exposure to low level DirectX/OpenGL and also a 3D engine so that they can gain experience as technical and content programmers.
- Students coming out of different universities have different areas of strengths and weaknesses
- Students need to know dot products applications
- Students need to know how to debug, step through code, use the stack trace, read other people's code
- Students need to know more about the hardware that they develop on
I also got to present some of my own work and happily I was not pointed at and booed. We filmed the presentations and we'll be posting them up soon.
I'm also thinking that we need to have a games lab. I really want to take over BG212.
