Learning the Ten Commandments. And other useful stuff.

No pictures today. Work beckons. I started off the day at the Education summit. The keynote was given by Ernest Adams who set out his ten commandments for Game Developer Education. I've not got time to list them all, but I was particularly taken with number 9 "Award precision and punish hand waving" and number 8 "Gameplay comes first". It was also nice to see commandment 5 making the point that you should "Require Teamwork". Some of the others weren't that applicable to us at Hull, because we concentrate on the programming aspects of games rather than the whole game production process (that way our game development students graduate as genuinely useful computer scientists) but it was nice to find that we don't break any major ones.

Next came a session on how to create a successful game development course. It was interesting to see that as one the members of the panel were keen on teamwork and communication skills. One even said that you should encourage your students to enter competitions. Go Hull.

In the afternoon I changed tack and went to some XNA presentations. There were three excellent talks on how to optimise and debug XNA games. This stuff was great. Proper computer science being used in a really strong context. At the end they gave us a CD-ROM with the sessions on it. I hope that this material will also make its way onto the web at some point. If you are into coding you would love this stuff.

Then in the evening we staggered out to a free party and then ended the evening in the sports bar.