Why Torque in Education?

#1 This is a good question and as far as I know GarageGames is the only engine provider asking it. Here are some of the ways I have answered it in the past:

1) Our degree program runs the students from non-electronic games
through 2D games to 3D games. Without the Torque suite of products, the
students would have to learn on a number of unrelated development
products. With Torque, students can learn the basics on TGB and reuse
all that knowledge and expand upon it for TGE. There is already plenty
of anecdotal evidence that the students who used TGB for 2D games and
moved on to TGE had an easier time than the students who used Flash for
2D and then had to ramp up on TGE from scratch.

2) One of the biggest lessons I try to teach in my program is that no
one can develop in an ivory tower anymore. There are just too many
valuable resources on the internet to ignore them. Use of the Torque
products requires developers to become familiar with and active in the
Torque community. The more successful students learn early on to go to
the forums if they hit a dead end and to post their victories in order
to help others.

3) The Torque Game Engine is one of the most organized and documented
engines out there. I know professional developers who still pull their
hair out over the inner workings of certain high-priced triple-A
engines. At least with Torque, you can post your problem and get a good
variety of responses in a short time.

I have some more, but I want to see what others have to say first.

#2 Here's a quote I provided for Davey regarding TGB:

"Torque Game Builder (TGB) provides and extremely stable, flexible game
development platform for students in their first term at The Guildhall.
In a six-week team game project, they become familiar with practical
game design, game functionality scripting, 2D art creation, scene
composition including parallaxing layers, and user interface design.
TGB's simple, elegant art pipeline, powerful scripting interface, and
excellent particle system make it an extremely valuable game
development/teaching asset."

#3 I am just starting to teach 3D programming. I have made 2D games for years with Flash, GameMaker and other tools. In the process of looking for a 3D engine I reviewed about 12 products. Torque was the best for many reasons. Torque was the only engine in which I could build a 3D environment without having to read 2 books first. We have a limited time with students and instructors need to initiate projects quickly with success. The possibility that we could lose the students interest is real, especially if the engine is to hard to use up front. You also want to use a product that my students would "respect" , just one look at the FPS demo fills most students with enthusiasm. The Torque program in versions 1.5 and earlier were very affordable, but as I look at Torque 3D pricing, I hope Torque will not lock out High School students in small IT programs from this great product. The lic also seems to be time based so that a program with an already limited budget may have to repay every 2 years, I hope I am mis understanding the lic costs for the newest product, or at the very least. GG allow us to still buy the previous versions.

Game engines are good at exciting student interest in programming. Students can be taught how to conditionally loop to produce a series of multiplicatives that print out on a console, or they can be taught to move through a game loop to check for keyboard output that changes the position of a character on the screen, which is more exciting. I have taught programing in C++ with static textbooks in a DevC++ window, but make something “real” happen in a Torque simulation and the student stays awake wants more. Its like candy to the student, instant gratifiication.

In conclusion, the benefits to class experience include:

Quick up time with demo packs.
Easy to use and understand terrain creation with brushes.
Easy to use and understand software like Constructor to create buildings
Easy to understand folder setup.
Simple scripting ideas with C++ syntax.
Great books to go along like Torque for Teens and 3D Game Programing 2nd ed.
The demo packs are “interesting” for students to explore.
Students can produce results with immediate feedback.

And I could go on...

#4 Hi Lewis,

Thanks for your feedback. Torque has a strong presence in Academia as evidenced by the hundreds of schools which have licensed our technology for classroom use. I wanted to take a moment to talk about on our educational licensing model for a moment and let you know that schools receive a significant discount vs. our retail pricing. In fact if my investigation has served me correctly we are right in line with academic discount schedules offered by Adobe, Microsoft 3DS Max and other major software vendors. While it is true that Torque 3D will still be more expensive than previous versions of Torque we have remained mindful of the constant budget pressure that schools face and attempted to adjusted our academic pricing accordingly. If meeting our listed academic pricing would prevent you from adopting Torque at your school, please contact us directly at education@garagegames.com and we will do our best to work with you.

#5 Teaching in a community college, I find that Torque can be a great way to introduce many aspects of computer science and software engineering to complete beginners., and have fun at the same time.

Some of my game class topics include: 3D coordinate spaces; thinking in terms of lines, planes, polygons, meshes; bitmaps and color models; meshes and UV mapping; scene graphs, ray tracing, visibility determination, level of detail rendering, 3D sound; textures, bump mapping, damage decals; collision detection; object-oriented programming; event programming; physics for games; animation, keyframes and splines, bones, blending; particle animation, fog, smoke; network connections, client-server systems; user interfaces; AI.

Being mostly beginners, my students haven't mastered any of these in a programming sense. But they come out of my class at least knowing the vocabulary, and (usually) eager for more. They have a sense of how games are constructed, and how the components work together. And they get a sense for how they might fit into the world of game development. Torque is a great platform for exploring these things - it's easy for beginners to get started, and not too challenging for the teacher and system administrator.