teaching machines

HNRS 304.503 Lecture 0 – Tentative agenda

July 13, 2012 by . Filed under fall 2012, honors 304.503, lectures.

Call top-down teaching the kind of teaching where we you start from theory and abstraction and work your way down to application. I’m not going to take a top-down approach in this class.

Call bottom-up teaching the kind of teaching where you start with practical realizations and generalize up. This will be my approach to this class. Instead of giving you a topical outline, I’ll outline the games/scenes that we’ll likely use to structure our semester.

  1. A text adventure (1 week)
  2. Addteroids (programming and math, 2 weeks)
  3. Stuffed, a platformer about living lightly (physics, sprites, sound, 2 weeks)
  4. Little Lost Dragon (3-D, physics, texture, terrain modeling, 2 weeks)
  5. If You Sit Still Long Enough… cinema (box modeling, rigging, skinning, animation, 2 weeks)
  6. Cave Escape (more on texture, UV mapping, particle systems, 4 weeks)

The plan for homework is that you will have two weeks for each assignment, with our lab serving as dedicated group work time. The assignments are tentatively:

  1. A text adventure
  2. A 2-D game redux
  3. A maze
  4. A design document for spring
  5. Figure animation
  6. Prototype scene from spring game