Oh snap! I completely spaced on signing up for the class. That's totally my fault.
I would totally be interested in getting together for a study group, tho.
-- Mando
As many of you know I teach a class on game programming at Austin Community College. There are even a few of you out their who have taken it. For the first time I can remember it was canceled because not one student signed up for the class. I have had classes canceled because their weren't enough students, but I have never had zero students sign up for a class. The next day I read a student game postmortem linked off of slashdot that said that one of the problems they had was that they couldn't get enough programmers to join the project. It seems there were very few programmers in that school and the programmers were all busy doing their own projects.
I checked at ACC and I see that all the art, design, and production classes are full, or nearly full, and that the programming classes are all empty, or nearly empty.
I asked Bob McGoldrick (my boss at ACC) about this and he says that yes, most of the students are in the design track. He has trouble getting students for the programming track and they don't stay around very long, they take one or a few programming classes and then they leave the program.
Now it could be that my class sucks and the word of mouth about it has made people refuse to sign up for it. OTOH, my evaluations by the students who take my classes mark me as one of the most highly rated teacher in the program. Way above the ACC average.
So we have a pattern where there are lots of students learning game design and production and very few who can write the code, or even the scripts, needed for a modern game engine. Sounds like this is creating a great opportunity for game programmers. It also support the pattern I have seen in the past; there are lots of programmers who can do art and 3D modeling but very few artists who can do programming.
Oh well, I have two nights a week free that I wasn't expecting to have free.
Any comments?
Bob Pendleton
P.S.
Yeah, this is a person grumble about the state of the world. I really love teaching my classes at ACC and it disappoints me when they get canceled. Anyone in the Austin area interested in a game development study group?
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