Go for it! Your goal is definitely possible. I know because that's what we've been doing at our school for the past 18 months. Games development was a real interest point for many students so I started talking to people in industry and academia about the best way to approach this. No one really had any answers but we were given a few more problems to solve: "There are not enough skilled IT teachers so you need to address that problem at the same time" and "You need to find a way to attract more females into your classes." In the end I thought 'what the heck, I'll just run a class and we'll figure it out as we go.'
I guess the most challenging aspect has been the fact that I'm not a teacher, or a programmer, or a graphics person, or a mathematician, but I thought if I could find a way to support the learning then anyone could do it. To cut a long story short, I got the class to "brand" their class and they really took ownership of it, and that was key. The students work alongside me and help to make the decisions. We tried all sorts of things then we'd sit together and decide what worked and what didn't.
I'd actually been testing the pre-release of Kodu with the students so our first mentor was Mark Finch at Microsoft Research. We also had a guy visit that used to work at RockStar Studios. He talked to us about structuring our group like a games development company. Because we were constantly seeking advice from industry people, mentoring became a huge part of our model. Rather than writing a novel about it here, you can check out the model we came up with here:
http://www.uptdigital.com/
There's a video of our Microsoft TechEd 2011 presentation on the front page and also a description of how it all works on this page:
http://uptdigital.com/mod/resource/view.php?id=6
Our site is a bit of a mess. It has been a challenging year for us as we were right in the city during the earthquakes and had to be relocated (without our PC lab). We spent most of 2011 developing our concept and doing promotional work. In 2012 we're welcoming our first test pod in another school (John McGlashan College in Dunedin). UPT Digital students will help to mentor that pod. And, we're bringing NCEA assessments into the picture. One of our students did the Computer Science STAR course at Uni this year and got A+ and A-. In 2012, we have 5 students doing the STAR course.
I won't lie, this is chaotic, mind boggling, very challenging, and definitely not for the faint of heart, but it's inspiring, exciting, fun, empowering and WORTH IT!! We're creating a site called IT Hothouse at the moment. It might take us a while because we're learning as we go, but it's a generic brand we've created so other schools can manage their pods and connect together to support this kind of learning, and it will be free. We'd like to help and collaborate with other schools. Feel free to contact us. My contact details are on our website. We'd love to help if we can, and I'm pretty sure you could help us too!:)
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Go for it! Your goal is definitely possible. I know because that's what we've been doing at our school for the past 18 months. Games development was a real interest point for many students so I started talking to people in industry and academia about the best way to approach this. No one really had any answers but we were given a few more problems to solve: "There are not enough skilled IT teachers so you need to address that problem at the same time" and "You need to find a way to attract more females into your classes." In the end I thought 'what the heck, I'll just run a class and we'll figure it out as we go.' I guess the most challenging aspect has been the fact that I'm not a teacher, or a programmer, or a graphics person, or a mathematician, but I thought if I could find a way to support the learning then anyone could do it. To cut a long story short, I got the class to "brand" their class and they really took ownership of it, and that was key. The students work alongside me and help to make the decisions. We tried all sorts of things then we'd sit together and decide what worked and what didn't. I'd actually been testing the pre-release of Kodu with the students so our first mentor was Mark Finch at Microsoft Research. We also had a guy visit that used to work at RockStar Studios. He talked to us about structuring our group like a games development company. Because we were constantly seeking advice from industry people, mentoring became a huge part of our model. Rather than writing a novel about it here, you can check out the model we came up with here: http://www.uptdigital.com/ There's a video of our Microsoft TechEd 2011 presentation on the front page and also a description of how it all works on this page: http://uptdigital.com/mod/resource/view.php?id=6 Our site is a bit of a mess. It has been a challenging year for us as we were right in the city during the earthquakes and had to be relocated (without our PC lab). We spent most of 2011 developing our concept and doing promotional work. In 2012 we're welcoming our first test pod in another school (John McGlashan College in Dunedin). UPT Digital students will help to mentor that pod. And, we're bringing NCEA assessments into the picture. One of our students did the Computer Science STAR course at Uni this year and got A+ and A-. In 2012, we have 5 students doing the STAR course. I won't lie, this is chaotic, mind boggling, very challenging, and definitely not for the faint of heart, but it's inspiring, exciting, fun, empowering and WORTH IT!! We're creating a site called IT Hothouse at the moment. It might take us a while because we're learning as we go, but it's a generic brand we've created so other schools can manage their pods and connect together to support this kind of learning, and it will be free. We'd like to help and collaborate with other schools. Feel free to contact us. My contact details are on our website. We'd love to help if we can, and I'm pretty sure you could help us too! :)