The End of Week Two

It is Friday afternoon, and the ground floor of Knutti is a ghost town. I'm the last class of the day, wrapping things up at 1:10. In my office now, I find myself presented with a nice quiet time to reflect on the past week and catch up.

This is going to be a fun semester. My classes have a good mix of returning friends, and enough new ones to make it fresh but not overtax me with learning names. The second section of my Computer Mediated course is almost half football players. Never had that happen before...makes for a lively dynamic. If they learn about my world of technology, I may have to take the kids to a game to be immersed in theirs!

I'm getting a handle on my Game Design class. It was a rough start, especially with gmail refusing any account requests from Shepherd. But we struggled through, and have now (I hope) bridged the abyss between starting a new technology and actually studying/designing games. It takes a lot of thought to try and integrate Globaloria's content with my content, but the payoff will be worth it.

Went to the first Common Reading event, a showing of King Corn on Wednesday night. It told the disturbing story of the impact of corn on our food industry and our health. after the show I had to run to the grocery to pick up a few things. My youngest, Daisy, read the ingredients label of everything I put in the cart. A few of my game design students showed up; I had made it extra credit since we'll be designing games to educate on the topics covered in the Common Reading, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle." It was such a good film that I think I may need to order a copy of the DVD.

This week finds me easing back into work, and with it blogging.  While I loath the thought of summer ending, there is something reassuring about getting back into a schedule. 

Globaloria training was yesterday and will run through today. We looked at the game design presentations of the five groups after dinner. I think it is so brave for educators whose background is nowhere near coding to take on Flash assignments. And in good humor too!

I had felt bad about not being able to dedicate any time to my group's project (that crazy MFA got in the way!) but I think we all pulled it together in the 11th hour. Matt's game coding was very impressive. I need to take and download the working doc and look under the covers.

I still need to figure out how to use the wiki for swf files that have external xml and media files though. Guess a call to Jeff is in order. For our presentation I just loaded my slideshow on my Shepherd server.

Today's lecture on animation made me drag up an old file I did a year or two ago. You can take a look at the animation.