MrHoatzin

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by MrHoatzin

  6. Posted

    I think I've figured out my first lesson: I'll make them make music! I made a little demo.

     

    :woohoo:   :hat1::wtf::miyamoto:     :woohoo:

     

    This is quite a lot of fun so far and it hasn't even begun yet. I feel like this might make for a pretty inspired project idea. It would cover all kinds of useful concepts that they can use immediately to make things, let's them do it creatively and is inherently approachable by illustrating in real time through music. I'll walk them through setting it up from the outside in, start with a simple beat and then add things to it. Loops, conditionals, variables, even-odd alternating through modulus, expressive algebra, scope, functional programming, the runtime environment, and some light interface design to round it all off.

     

    Do you think it might be too much for a bunch of 11-14yos who might never have thought about programming at all before? I feel like the likeliness that few if any of them have made music before makes for a net positive. I mean, I've never made music before and that little demo surprisingly doesn't suck as much as it should... but then again, I know how to program... I wonder how good these kids are at math and if this math-looking stuff will scare them.

     

    Also I am kinda looking forward to the cacophony of this classroom. :ancient:

     

    Scratch is a pretty badass environment for teaching programming too. The only shortcoming I found is that I wish it had boolean variables, or some kind of notion of string truthiness, and didn't make you go through the trouble of comparing integers/vaguely typeless strings to 1.

  8. Posted

    Is it just me or is government in general everywhere super suspect? Third parties (or fourth or whatever) are only uncorrupted because they have been away from power forever. In the US there hasn't been a way to vote for any kind of substantive change in 50 years, with left or right governments, and this is increasingly evident to a lot of people. It could be that I am relatively lonely in seeing through the smoke and mirrors and live in a bubble/echo chamber of disaffection.

    Anyway, I look at Yugoslavia. Breaking that mess up didn't solve anything, it just allowed local demagogues to rip their people off. Since the Roman empire, peoples around Europe have looked to sovereignty as the panacea to all the oppression and it has yet to really work. Sovereignty being a little Roman empire to call our own. So even with sovereignty we're all still under capitalism. Even 20th century communism was a kind of capitalism when you think about it, a bureaucratic capitalism, with an elite ruling the masses of commodified labor.

    So TLDR, fuck the state in general. Individual clowns inside the machine, whichever team they play for, just fucking won't help us.

  13. Posted

    Crock pot is super forgiving with chicken. One thing to remember is to always do higher temp for 4 hours—if you do the lower temp for 8 hrs the bones will explode and it will be near impossible to eat. There is this tamarind chutney that is not very sweet, sold in jars in hippie food places. I can't remember what it's called. Just lay the chicken (with maybe baby potatoes, chunks of carrot, peas, whatever veggies you got at hand) on the bottom, cover it with the chutney and forget it for four hours. Any kind of canned pasta sauce works as well.

  14. Posted

    That is my plan! Absolutely no talking down. I hope to keep any rigid top-down instruction to a minimum. I'm there to show them some neat games they may not have experienced before, get them thinking critically about them, and help them figure out how to make things like those games themselves.

     

    Right now they're still quite amorphous in my mind so "these kids" is the best I have to call them. Lately I've been hanging out with some artists and theater peeps who're about half-a-dozen-or-so years younger than me and calling them "kids" even though they're fully-formed human beings, peers and colleagues. I should probably knock that out...

  16. Posted

    WTF Miffy, that's some grade A nonsense! You've been on top of the whole teaching thing for so long and job shit is still fucked up and bullshit? Makes no sense! You should call Canada's Royal Ombudsman for Meritocracy and tell him what for.

     

    :pan:

    :devil:

     

    Speaking of teaching, that Teach Kids to Program Arty Video Games Extracurricular Program Thing I mentioned in the dev forum is in the bag! I bagged it. Ooh yeah. Job pimp over here. :woohoo:

     

    I have until Oct 4th to figure out what to teach, learn to teach, and then proceed not to fuck it up for at least a semester. Direct any pointers you may have for a green teacher type into that thread.

  23. Posted

    Thanks for all the feedback, taking notes here!

     

    It is supposed to be a practical course, kinda hands-offish on my end; I'm supposed to help them figure out how to do things they want to do, teach them programming, and keep the scope of their projects manageable... I would imagine I might eventually have to (learn so that I can) teach Blender (last time I messed with 3D was 3D Studio Max ten years ago), some animation, how to develop efficiency tools, optimize production pipelines, etc. All handy skills to have...

     

    But it is also an art program, so it is my responsibility to educate them about how to think critically about video games and artistic applications of systems in general. I'm definitely going to have to (drag my PS3 in and) show them Noby Noby Boy, Journey; (steam up and show) Gone Home, Thirty Flights of Loving, Papers Please, Proteus, etc; things like Minecraft I seriously doubt they'll need to be introduced to, but maybe I can use it as a touchstone and a starting point of the conversation, explain what a huge important game it is and why, get them thinking about what interesting things they could try to make. I'll be able to set the agenda with assignments.

     

    Mac might not be too big an issue, we could do Parallels or—if it is some kind of memory-hoggy situation—dual boot. I'm definitely thinking about sticking to portable, open tech that kids can take home and continue work on, on their PCs or whatever.