This place reminds me a lot of San Francisco. Same nice weather. Same driving on the wrong side of the road.
Kind of similar bridge
Same amazing skies
..and they had a very nice conference centre too
I had a really good time over here. Next time I'm going to try to stay a lot longer.
On the way back to the hotel I passed a bus full of students who had been at one of my talks and were now heading home.
Frankly, I fear for them....
[Graphics Heavy Post Alert]
Derek knows San Francisco very well. And apart from his habit of walking very fast up hills he makes for an excellent tour guide. Today we started down at the harbour.
Ferry boat and the "other" bridge
View from the pier
Posing bird
Tugs
Pier amusements
Fancy boat - and no, it didn't hit the jetty
The famous Lombard Street
View from Coit Tower
Another view
Bridge and Bay
They had some great murals in the tower
I like this place
There are a few more on Flickr
I've been thinking a bit about how "sexy" the subject of Computer Science is. In her intro yesterday Karen Young from Microsoft mentioned that it was being seen as less attractive as a subject for students to take up. Applications to study computing are presently falling in Europe and the USA and for the life of me I can't understand why.
A few years ago there was a bit of a dip in the business, but at the moment the demand for computer literate people is as strong as it has ever been. If you are looking to move into a field where you get to shape the future and also build it then you should enter computing. If you like working with people, finding out what they want and creating answers to questions then you should enter computing. If you like puzzles and working in an environment where things just get more interesting every day, then you should enter computing. I can't think of any other field where you have the potential to have so much impact on the future. Computers are already a huge part of people's lives and that is set to accelerate.
For me the question is not "Why should I study computing?", it is "Why would I not?".
I've put my first XNA file on VerySillyGames. It is just a silly screen display. The source code will be provided when the book is released. It is a nice example of how you can get really good graphical effects almost by mistake. You can find a runnable version of the program for the PC at www.verysillygames.com. It is optimised for 1280 x 1024 displays on a PC with the XNA framework installed. An Xbox version will be available later.
I've added rotation to the original program, let me know what you think
If you are lucky enough to be a student at Hull you can join the VerySillyGames.com development effort, where we are going to take some of the silly game ideas and try to make them real. This time next year we'll all be millionaires. Oh yes.
I've been playing with XNA for the new book (book news coming soon, along with another chapter). As part of this I investigated the use of layers and transparency and what happens if you draw lots of coloured things on top of each other. I ended up with this rather attractive arty looking display which I've made into a clock.
Having decided that the output looked nice, I then reckoned that from a software point of view the code could be a lot better organised. So I went in and tidied things up, re-factored classes, improved the scaling and made the movement of the layers more realistic. And of course the "proper" version looked rubbish.
I'll be making the clock available on verysillygames.com later on. And you can actually see the clock in action here. It is a bit jerky, but it gives you an idea of how it works.
I've just spent 24 quid. That is probably what some people spend on drinks on a Friday night. I could have got half of Bioshock for the 360 (which number one son says is worth a punt). I could have bought "Elite Beat Agents" for the Nintendo DS (but I don't have to because number one son got me it for my birthday). Instead I've bought:
- for two years. I know I could have got it cheaper, but I like to have all my domains in one place and I've used my favourite company for years and they have a very easy to use interface.
It occurred to me that I'm going to need a place to put all the silly XNA games that will form part of the book. So I bought the domain. At the moment it points into this site, but that can change. Anyone fancy setting me a site up for 25% of the equity, a profit sharing scheme and fringe benefits (in other words no money at all)?
Oh and Chapter 3 is coming along nicely. I should have it on the site some time next week. Prepare yourselves for the gaming sensation that is "Color Nerve" (note American spelling in vain attempt to increase market penetration).
I'm writing another book. If you want to learn how to program an XBOX 360 using C# and XNA it might be just what you want. You can find out more, and get your hands on the first chapter, here.
Wish me luck....
(This is a very graphics heavy post. And there are literally hundreds more pictures on Flicker if you want to see them)
Today was culture day. So early in the morning we headed off to the Seoul Museum of History in a bus with very funky ceiling
Rather sadly it was raining heavily, but fortunately we had each been provided with an umbrella. When we got to the museum they had set up a super little machine which provides you with a little bag to put your wet umbrella in, which was very cute.
Students in search of culture (shurely shome mishtake?)
The museum was great, although we didn't really have time to do it justice. In Europe we like to lord it over our American cousins, because we have stuff which is hundreds, nay thousands of years older than most of the history that they've got. Well, the Koreans have got us beat hands down. On the evidence of the museum they were building rich and complex civilizations whilst us brits were living in caves and running around painted blue.
Next stop was Gyeong Bok Gung. This is a royal palace of the Jaseon Dynasty (it says here). All I know is that it was fantastic, and I got some lovely pictures.
Mist on the mountains
The team with their new best friend
Courtyard
Perhaps my favourite picture so far
I don't know what they are, but they look nice
After the palace we moved on to Bibimbob Olympic Stadium for lunch.
Big place....
The food was prepared in an enormous wok, big enough for the chef to actually get into.
I cooking with a step ladder...
Then some of the competitors were invited to have a stir with the biggest wooden spoons I've ever seen.
Stirring stuff
While we waited for the food too cook the Egyptian team managed amazing feats of balance...
Big Wok Lunch
Now, anyone who knows me well will have encountered my massive conservatism where food is concerned. I'm just not adventurous when it comes to eating habits. Steak and chips is about as exotic as I get most of the time. Having said that, I did my best and Matt Steeples from our team managed to excel himself by just about clearing his plate. Then it was on to the boat trip.
Earlier this week there was a big feature on the UK MSN homepage about the value of a university degree. The central thrust of the feature was that a degree does not prepare you for the real world and leaves you only with an enormous debt and a huge hangover.
The article contained a link to a discussion where folks told tales of woe and how their hard earned qualification has not landed them the job of their dreams.
The way I see it (if you really want to know) is that if you decide you want some thing (such as the "job of your dreams") then you should plan a campaign which will get you it. A degree can be a useful part of such a campaign. But it is not the only one. You should find every other possible way to get there. Try to land some work experience in the area. Do things that broaden you out and make you more "interesting" to people working in the field.
If you want to be a games programmer, by all means do a degree in it, but also start writing little games and putting them on your games programming blog. Start contributing to forums about the field, asking and answering sensible questions. Get a job in the business, even if it is just working in a games shop. It all helps make you into a more enticing prospect.
Getting a degree and then expecting to be snapped up because of your evident brilliance will not work. In fact I don't think it ever did. When I did mine, all those years ago, when history was current affairs etc etc I remember being told that a degree is not a job ticket, but merely a licence to hunt....
Today is Slide 7 day. Slide (Students Learn Innovative Developer Expertise - or something - we picked the name because the domain name was available) is run by Microsoft the Academic team at Microsoft UK in Reading. They put on sessions about professional development and get a bunch of students to turn up. This year it was all about connected applications.
Our posse on the way into the Mother Ship....
I took a minibus full of folks from Hull to join the hundred or so others that had made their way from all over the country for the show.
And the show was good. There was a slight dip in quality after lunch, when I did my bit on Web Services, but the rest of the material was top notch. There were sessions on Web 2.0 (where we discussed the question of what Web 2.0 actually is), ASP, Windows Live and Orcas. And then a great talk at the end on Sliverlight.
People, you should find out more about Silverlight. You should also sign up for Popfly since this is mucho funo. I've been playing a bit with my Popfly account and it makes it dangerously easy to develop impressive applications.
My Audience (most of the students were next door, but we manage to make more noise than them...)
Mingling at the BBQ
At the end we had a BBQ and a great time was had by all. There will probably be a Slide 8, you should get your name down for it if there is...
Ed Dunhill, the Microsoft bod who made it all happen (Kudos Ed) is going to post all the slides and other material on his blog.
Then, after a five hour rumble up the motorway it was home in time for bed.
Today has been busy. Oh yes. It started with an unexpected lecture. We are now in week 11 of the semester, with teaching supposed to have finished at the end of week 10. But the first year students wanted more, and so I went off at 9:15 to deliver. Actually, it worked quite well, in that I was able to go through the quiz that I set last week.
Then it was back to the labs to get ready for our XNA event. Andy Sithers from Microsoft had come over to formally hand over the XBOX 360s they have given us to help with our XNA teaching in the first year. We had to set them up in the lab for the pictures, and get some stuff working. Simon Dickson and Phil Cluff from our first year came in to show of what they have been doing.
Then, after a quick lunch the presentation tool place. We all contorted ourselves into the best position for the perfect shot for the papers. Danielle Cod from Radio Humberside interviewed our head of department, Andy, Simon and Phil and finally me, in search of the perfect soundbyte. You can grab the resulting two minute piece here. Much to my dismay they seem to have left Andy and Warren on the cutting room floor.....
This picture kind of captures the event. In the back Warren Viant, our head of department, is being recorded whilst Andy Sithers ponders the code and Simon grapples with debugging and being interviewed all at the same time....
After all this we had to dash off to an event that I had pretentiously entitled our "Software Symposium". (Did you know that symposium used to mean drinking session?). Anyhoo, the event started with a double headed presentation from Robert Hogg of software developers Black Marble and Ed Gibson who is Chief Security Advisor for Microsoft UK. The topic was safety and computers.
I'd heard bits of it before at the Black Marble event last year, but it was obviously news to the audience, who sat silently as Robert and Ed laid it on the line about just how scary things are. I managed to be both petrified about what was going on out there and relieved that Robert and Ed are going around spreading the word and engaging budding software developers with the problems posed by the wonderful connected world we live in.
The point they made forcefully and effectively is that the big problems are not down to technology, they are down to people. If we don't keep our software up to date and we allow ourselves to be bamboozled into giving passwords to cunning callers then no amount of code is going to help.
Next, and on a somewhat lighter note, the Seedlings, our Imagine Cup winning team, gave us a presentation of their entry. The First Programming Language they are working on is aimed to engage everyone with the kind of problem solving techniques that will allow them to use a computer to best advantage, whether or not they end up writing programs.
Then after a closing address from Andy Sithers of Microsoft, about the value of competition and the usefulness to students of just plain taking part, it was time to zoom off and try to find a recorder for the radio broadcast.....
Busy day.
car-airport-plane-airport-plane-airport-taxi-conference centre-hotel
Well, that was my day. How about yours?
Some time back I got an email offering me a chance to speak at a student conference in Portugal. The date was a long way away, and I was pretty sure it was out of term time, my boss said it was OK, so I agreed to go. What with the Imagine Cup effort at Hull, and my term dates being messed up, I very nearly didn't make it. But I'm glad I did. Even if it meant getting up at 4:00 am and a couple of flights to get here, Lisbon is worth the effort. I was expecting to speak to a room full of students.
Well, there was a room, and it was pretty full, but it was a bit more than I expected. Tech Days is essentially TechEd for Portugal only. I'm rather jealous. I wish there was something like this in the UK.
TechDays has everything that TechEd does, speakers shirts, timetable of interesting sessions, plush venue. And loads of keen delegates, including several hundred students who are given a day pass to the most interesting sessions. One of which was mine....
I was talking about XNA, the way that you can write games in C# for your XBOX 360. It is a subject that I like talking about, and the audience seemed happy to hear about it too. Even putting up with the jokes... I was a bit worried whether or not my particular brand of humour would go OK with a Portuguese audience. But in the end everyone seemed to have a good time, and a bunch of students even stayed behind at the end to hear the famous "Orange for a Head" joke. And then promptly wished they hadn't.
I would very much have liked to stay longer. I only managed to get to one session, about the Microsoft Robotics Studio. This is something I'd love to have more time to get to grips with. It is a fantastic way to start programming robots, with a proper simulated physics environment and an interface to lots of robot platforms, including the new Lego Mindstorms. Maybe when I get back I'll set aside an afternoon as robot playtime and see what we can make.
At the end of the day I staggered back to my room in a very nice hotel, and just flaked out.
Anyway, thanks very much to Microsoft Portugal for inviting me and making me so welcome, for the audience for making the trip worthwhile, and to KLM for actually finding me some seats on the plane with legroom. I've only been in Portugal for around 16 hours, I can promise that I will be back, and that next time it will be for a proper look round.
Today was the day that Jon and I sang for our supper, so to speak. We were the "international" part of an international discussion of computer games and curriculum. I talked about XNA and Jon talked about Skill Set Accreditation. We both only had five minutes to fill, which is both a blessing and a curse. Not much time for bad things to happen, but hard to fit everything in. In the end it all went swimmingly. And there are pictures.
Gathering for the conference
Need a haircut
Had a haircut
A bit of abstract stuff
Flags
Off for a walk
This is what makes the cable cars work....
Nice Church
Wires
Refueling
Bikes
I love this kind of stuff...
Down on the wharf. Ask Jon about the lens he nearly bought...
Work that lens....
I've no idea what the boat is called. But it looks nice
"Love Songs" album cover shot....
Our hotel is about under that flag...
Nice sky
..and just one more...
This is a text heavy post. Sorry about that, but I figured I'd better write some proper stuff so that the boss doesn't think I've spent all my time in SF (you are allowed to call it that once you've been here three days) wandering round taking photographs...
Today we discussed computer games in the context of education. Which has been very interesting. Quite a bit of the discussion has been outside the scope of what we presently do at Hull, but it is fascinating in itself. At Hull we teach Computer Science with Games Programming.
The word with in our course title is very important. It means that we are going to make you into a Computer Scientist, but one who can work with the particular needs of the computer games industry. This means that you'll be grappling with performance issues, 3D graphics, physics and artificial intelligence, because that is what sits underneath games and makes then tick. You will also be dealing with things like project management, software engineering and working in a team, because this is how games are actually got out of the door and into the shops.
We do not teach game design, story telling, character construction or fine art. These are totally separate fields and dealt with by specialist team members. However, a lot of folks at the conference do teach this material. And it is fascinating. We had some game industry gurus along to give us their take on education and research and the results are thought provoking stuff.
The first thing that came up was how little we really know about computer games and education. We are only just starting to figure out what categories of material there are in the field, and how they relate to each other, and what we can teach about them. There is quite a bit of resistance to teaching about games in academic circles, which I think is a shame. Media is a well established area of study, and I think that compared to computer games it is somewhat shallow.
After all, we don't find completely new forms of TV receiver, with new and interesting abilities, appearing every five years. And the narrative and structure of content delivered with just a picture and some sound that you sit in front of is much more restrictive than something that you can interact with directly. Perhaps things will change, perhaps we'll get the word game out of computer gaming, align it with the entertainment field, and then it will become more respected as an area for study. Perhaps.
Doug Church from Electronics Arts delivered the keynote, talking about research in computer games. The news was not good. Points that he made included (apologies for any mis-quotes):
So, with all that said, what do we do? Well, there was an acknowledgement that students are where the future is at, and they must be connected to the profession, preferably on a one to one basis. Computer game education should be seen as "an invitation into a community and a chance to choose a future". In other words, a game you might like to play I suppose.
The way forward is through frequent, immersive, collaboration between student, teacher and professional. The way I see it, this could just about work. As long as students understand that the business is a profession, and not just a way to live out your fantasies, the industry starts to take a longer term view of research and academics start to play more games and take them more seriously.
Then Doug said something which really cheered me up He emphasized how important it is for the game creators to function as a team, communicate ideas to each other and plain just work together. "Human interaction is the hardest part of the job".We've been hammering this at Hull for years, and it is nice to see it brought out again as a priority by the game makers. He also mentioned that estimation is important. Whenever you do something you should try and work out how long you think it will take. Apparently he process of making a wrong guess is very useful educationally...
Then after lunch we did some work on creating gameplay that was intriguing. We played a game involving bits of paper and paperclips, and then fiddled with the rules and changed the scenario. This was great fun. At the end we had something that we might want to take somewhere into a computer program. Things that came out:
I'd love to take these ideas and get students to brainstorm some gameplay and then build it. I'm not sure if this would be part of our taught provision at Hull, but it would be good fun for our fledgling game creators club to have a go it. Inspiring stuff.
Someone actually asked me for a copy of Pastemaster. It is a text boilerplating tool that I wrote rather than mark exams. I've written an installer, improved it a bit and added it to my Lively Learning pages.
In the old days, when I had a bunch of marking to do I would go off to the union shop and spend ages choosing a suitable red pen. I'd try each of those on sale at least once and then carefully weigh up the heft of the pen, the quality of the ink colour, the feel of the writing action and so on. I could usually pass quite a while doing these activities, not actually doing anything towards getting the marking done, but feeling good about the fact I was in fact making progress. When of course I wasn't.
Spool forward a few years and I can't do this any more. Some of the stuff doesn't use a pen at all, everything happens on the computer. But I still need my displacement activities. Fortunately the computer, if it is nothing else, is a wonderful source of potential displacement.
I've been marking stuff submitted via Class Server. This has the option for the marker to create six pre-formed text items which can be inserted into the student comments. Thing is, six is nothing. I've got loads more than that. Loads. It really hurts to type the same kind of thing over and over, but I need more than six. More like sixty. So, I built PasteMaster to do this for me. It took me around an hour to build, which is probably longer than I spent choosing pens, but I think it is worth it.
You can type the comments into the text fields and then when you press the button they are inserted into the block at the bottom. You can edit the text at the bottom and add new bits, and everything you add is also placed in the paste buffer, so you can drop the whole report into any windows app. It remembers the comments from last time you ran it, and there are 6 pages of 12 comments that are colour coded and you can flip between. I managed to set up a page of comments about each of the deliverables I was asking for, so that I could pull out pre-formed bits where appropriate and save myself quite a bit of typing.
(I was going to add a "randomise" button which would pull a comment out of a textbox on each frame and make a random response, but I thought this might be dangerous....)
Anyhoo, it works a treat and saved me a fair bit of typing. Of course, I could have used Notepad, but I think it would have been a bit harder to do and I would not have had the fun of making Pastemaster work.
If you fill out forms with pre-formed responses, or you do the kind of marking that I do, you might like a copy. If so, let me know....
One of my favourite books since forever is "Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder. It recounts the story of an attempt by a bunch of engineers to build a new microcomputer for an ungrateful company.
Whilst the technology described is now very elderly (the book was originally published in 1981) the story of what drives engineers to create is still bang up to date. So, get the book and read it. Even (or perhaps especially) if you know nothing about computers.
Then spool forward 26 years in time and read Dreaming in Code. I've not got it yet myself yet, but a review which compares it to "Soul" is good enough to get me onto the Amazon site and flashing my credit card.
The Sunday Times has been advertising a new feature aimed at improving the mental prowess of the nation. On Sunday you will get a free DVD which will let you measure your brain power. Whoopee.
I hate things like this. I hate IQ tests, I think they are silly. If you get a low score you get upset because you think you are thick. If you get a high score in one of these tests you get upset because you are not running the country (not that this is necessarily an advert for cleverness).
Of course the real reason that I hate the tests is because I get very confused/irritated by them. When confronted by a "pick the right answer/odd one out/next in sequence" kind of question I can usually think of a whole bunch of reasons why any one of them could be the correct one, depending on the whim of the person setting the test. So what I'm really finding out is if my interpretation of the situation is the same as someone else. Who presumably has a "gold standard" of cleverness in their office.
You might find it strange that someone who often has to measure how good people are at something by setting exams and exercises dislikes IQ tests so much. I think the thing is that what I try to assess is how useful somebody would be. Given a bunch of learning outcomes (which is what courses have these days) I'm going to set questions that will try to find out how useful you can be with the knowledge that you are supposed to have.
I'll start by asking a few things which will determine whether or not you have taken the trouble to learn the fundamentals of the subject and then give you a bunch of situations where you can demonstrate that you can use this understanding to achieve things. Finally, I'm going to try and get you into a place where you can say "There are no right answers here, just different compromises which reflect different priorities" and then tell me all about these.
Of course not everything can be nailed down like this, and I'm also going to want to see how well you can present your understanding (which is why we get the first year students to demonstrate their programs), but it is a good start.
I've nothing against doing stuff which keeps your brain agile (I love the little brain power games for the Nintendo DS). But I am strongly against dodgy pseudo-scientific tests which don't really prove anything useful.
You may not know I'm writing a book (there must be some people left on the planet that I've not told yet). Anyhoo, I am. Writing a book. (makes a change from colouring them in I suppose)
The book is about embedded development using the .NET Micro Framework. This is something I'm very excited to be involved with. I reckon the framework could do wonderful things for the process of writing code for very small processors (the kind you find in remote controls and other small computer controlled devices). It makes embedded code more reliable and easier to write. Wonderful stuff.
If you want to read bits of the book before it gets printed, and even pass comment on them, you can take a look here.
We got up nice and early and headed for the university. Unfortunately, thanks to traffic, we were a bit later arriving on campus than I wanted, but still in time to do a bunch of interviews for the press.
The morning talks were all about how the XNA technology works and how it fits into to the games industry. The answers, by the way, are very well and very well. It is really easy to use and, whilst not yet applicable to "top of the range" games is going to find increasing favour in the games industry as they come to terms with just how much easier it makes things.
Then it was lunch, another interview, and then time for my bit. The talk seemed to go OK, the audience were polite enough to laugh at most (but not all of) my jokes. You can find the presentation, complete with clip art, here.
Then Peter Molyneux gave his session. Which was excellent. The most important thing that came out of his talk was the emphasis that he places on communication skills. You should be good at your part of the game production process. You should be brave enough to take your ideas and champion them passionately. But you also need people skills. If you can't persuade, argue, admit when you are wrong and keep as many people happy as possible during the rollercoaster ride that is game development then you are going to have a hard time. That was very good to hear. At Hull we push those aspects of professional development very hard indeed, and it was good to hear one of the best game creators in the business echo them for me.
We even made the BBC News.
And then we got in the magic bus for the trip home.
One of these students has won an XBOX 360 at the XNA launch event. Can you use your powers of observation to discover which one?
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
Begin to Code with JavaScript is now available for purchase and download. You can find it here
