Design College
Designer and guest teacher
at Designskolen Kolding
Developer Profile: Designskolen Kolding.
At Designskolen Kolding, Unity was used to teach first-year students about designing and implementing serious games.
Interaction designer and teacher Patrik Svensson talks about the course.
Who are you?My name is Patrik Svensson. I was born in Sweden, but I came to Denmark in 1999 when I started studying at Designskolen Kolding at the department of Interactive Media. Before that I studied fine arts for 2 years in Malmö, Sweden. Since graduating in 2004, I've freelanced as an interaction designer and worked as a guest teacher at Designskolen Kolding.
What kind of school is Designskolen Kolding?Designskolen Kolding is, alongside Danmarks Designskole in Copenhagen, the main Design University in Denmark. Currently the school has 5 departments, all providing a Bachelor and a Masters Program. I'm teaching in the Bachelor Program at the Department of Interactive Media, where I'm mainly running workshops in Basic Programming using Processing.
The Serious Games with Unity workshop was the first of its kind in Kolding and as such a sort of experiment. An experiment that turned out very well.
Childrens game: build a castle from
blocks in a friendly environment.
Mars Explorer: explore Mars in this
game designed for NASA's website.
The students where first year Interactive Media students, most in their early twenties.
Which applications did they already know, and what apps did you use during the course?They've all had Basic Programming with Processing, a Java-like programming environment. This was helpful when they started scripting in Unity. For 2D graphics we used Photoshop, which most of the students use on a daily basis. For 3D we used Maya. Unfortunately there had been no Maya courses in the first year, so 3D modelling proved a bit tricky.
How long did the course run?Four weeks, with just 1.5 – 2 weeks for the actual production of the games.
What were the results?The outcome was 1-level demos, showing gameplay and look of the intended games. The class was divided into 3 groups with 3-4 students in each group so in the end we had three very different working prototypes.
What did the students learn?Given the short period of time the groups had to create the games, they all had to split the tasks among them in order to meet the deadline. Some students focused on scripting while others worked on 2D and 3D graphics. As an introduction to the workshop we talked about games theory in general and Serious Games in particular, so all the students gained an understanding of the workings of computer games.
Sex education: circumvent birth controls
to learn about their effectiveness.
I think all of the students where very excited about the course. They all put in a lot of hours and really pushed themselves to be able to finish in such a short time.
What was the best part of the Unity experience?As a teacher it was incredible to see just how fast you can learn Unity and start making quite complex experiences. Alongside learning a new software package the students had to come up with a Serious Games concept and develop sounds and graphics, so it was really a lifesaver that Unity is as easy to learn as it is.
Hanging out in the lab.
The main obstacle was the lack of prior 3D knowledge among the students. Fortunately a few had worked with 3D before and became modellers for the entire class. Also, parallel with the Unity workshop the thirds year students were doing a Maya course, so there was some help to get there as well.
