Welcome to my Programming Blog...

I am currently working on a couple of projects: An original game called "Implosion" which I am porting from Flash to the iPad, and a remake of Q*bert in Python (pygame), as part of the class I am teaching. Please feel free to use the "Labels" (at right) to follow a specific project or theme. If you are one of my Python students, I recommend that you check out the Python thread.

Sunday, January 2, 2011

Last minute prep for cocos2d class

I'm sitting down with a chunk of time and few distractions to actually try the examples that I am planning to teach tomorrow in my cocos2d class - the first day. As always, it is interesting to note the difference between what I know I can do and the practice of actually doing it!

Right now, I am playing around with actions, updates and touches, working through the "Your first game" tutorials in both cocos2d's official tutorial and Steffen Itterheim's book. There are things I like about both of them, and things I'd prefer to avoid, at least at first, of course. (E.g., accelerometers - many of our students will be rocking the simulator, so that's going to fall under "advanced" for this course.) I think I'll try to find a middle ground.

One tricky thing I need to do is to find a way to do an exercise for the kids so they can extend what they are doing, not just repeat what we did in class. I don't think I did a very good job of that last year, so we just did a lockstep "type in the following! Look what it did!" kind of class. For some students, that's enough to get them thinking and exploring, but I can't assume that of everybody, of course.

So those are my challenges as I head into the evening.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

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