Unity at school

[idle pasture]

All opinions are welcome.

[mild mica]

Is it expected that students already have a solid foundation on programming?

[idle pasture]

Yeah. They should be ok on that front. Its an IT school first and foremost.

[rigid ginkgo]

God, we didn't get to saving and loading with JSON until the final year of the degree

[idle pasture]

Yeah. I really don't like teaching people to save in player prefs.
Thats just bad and so limiting. Especially when most of them are already decent programmers.

[mild mica]

I haven't been in this position before, but I wonder whether it would be better to optimize for the odds of students leaving with a desire to continue with game development. I think this is packed with a lot of value, but do you get a good taste of game development?
Would cutting the current roadmap in half to leave other half for solo or group projects result in a higher chance of students spending more of their free time on this?

[idle pasture]

Hmm. Not in my experience.
I went through something similar where we basically had all the tasks I outlined here as homework.
And I think it was pretty bad because everybody would just do the bare minimum and submit it.

These 7 lessons are followed up with 6 lessons where a group project is prototyped and then a semester later with a full semester course where that prototype is just pushed to "completion".

From what I saw a lot of the teams went down very bad path as far as coding went.
They also had no idea about basic features such as Timeline for cutscenes (instead using one BIG animator etc..)

In the end I completly agree with your fear of putting a bad taste in their mouth.
But I feel like having to work on a project for a whole semester when your base knowledge is lacking is even more depressing 🤔

[mild mica]

Oh if there are other lessons dedicated to creating stuff, then that's pretty much what I was looking for anyway.