TGB in Community College courses?

#1 Checking into this for you. I will probably not have an answer until after the weekend.

#2 I'd also be interested to hear about colleges that are using TGB. What have your experiences been? What advice might you offer others considering using the tool?

#3 After looking into this, I was not able to find any available resources for curriculum suggestions regarding TGB.

Once Torque 3D and iTorque are lifted from my plate, I was considering looking into special documentation just for the academic realm (as an aid to instructors).

As it stands, though, the best information you can get will come from those in charge of education. Please contact daveyj@garagegames.com

#4 Hi David-

There are hundreds of Universities and community colleges world wide using Torque in the classroom. Many of them migrated to Torque after using Game Maker, Direct X, XNA or Flash because they wanted a more robust game engine or tool set. You can see the full list of schools using Torque here:http://www.garagegames.com/products/education.

GarageGames has made several attempts to create a Torque Curriculum Repository, however, our instructors have been hesitant to submit their curriculum to our site. At times, we've also looked into commissioning curriculum, but we did not receive a consensus as to what learning objectives were the most suited to/relevant to demonstrating with Torque. Torque is a very flexible tool and can be adapted to address wide variety of computer science, design and software engineering learning objectives. My best advice would be to check out the IGDA Education Sid curriculum archive and integrate TGB into some of the courses listed there.

#5 A little google-fu turns up results like this:
www.cs.colby.edu/courses/J09/cs369/index.php

Look through their game programming sections for more keyword ideas to use in a more extensive search :)

#6 If I manage to get into teaching (couple years of grad school left first and then needs to find someone willing to hire me...) I want to use TGB for teaching intro programming courses. Making a sprite move around seems more real world experience than printing "hello world" in loops...

#7 In Winter 2009 I taught an introductory game course using Game Maker and these textbooks
(1) http://www.amazon.com/Game-Makers-Apprentice-Development-Technology/dp/1590596153/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241538170&sr=1-1
(2) http://www.amazon.com/Game-Development-Essentials-Jeannie-Novak/dp/1418042080/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b

The Game Maker program, combined with the first book, provides students the ability to develop 2D games with very little help. It includes sounds, sprites, click-by-click instructions, etc. The second book provides a comprehensive explanation of the game business, and provides interesting lecture topics.

I was considering Torsion and TGB for an Introductory 2D Game Scripting course. The technical features and depth of Torsion and TGB, coupled with the Torque migration to 3D, were compelling. But, compared to Game Maker, the academic resources for TGB are far less mature.

I have developed ~6 prototype games in TGB with Torsion and found these to be the most useful resources:
> TGB tutorials
> Web resources (GG, TDN, Google)
> Game Programmer's Guide to Torque (Maurina)
> Multiplayer Gaming and Engine Coding ... (Maurina)
I could get TGB to do nearly anything I wanted, but navigating the scattered documentation and version differences made development time unpredictable. The only significant drawback I found with TGB was the slow multiplayer network performance (~10 updates/sec).

A Community College course based on these resources could be developed, but I would want to have the bulk of the TGB laboratory assignments roughed-in prior to starting the semester. TGB would be much easier to integrate into a course if a set of ~12 (incremental, complete, and bug-free) tutorials were available that supported an available version of both Torsion and TGB. Game Maker has a published book that exceeds this level of academic support.

#8 @David - Could you go into further details about what the 12 tutorials would need to accomplish? This can be very useful to me.

1. Why 12? Are you alluding to a 12 week class with one tutorial a week?
2. Incremental by subject or difficulty?
3. 12 tutorials based on a single game, or stand-alone guides?
4. Complete, meaning a finished game demo or educational goals?

Around the office, we have been talking about developing course guides that would be separate from the official documentation and books. These would specifically target the education realm, so any feedback from instructors if vital in this area. My attempts to gather this kind of feedback have been like pulling teeth.

#9 I've taught a couple of game development classes using Torque at Holyoke Community College in Massachusetts. While Torque is pretty good to work with, both classes fell short of what I'd hoped for.

One reason: I had a budget of $0, and had to come up with all the ancillary software from open source projects. Blender is a pain to work with (Blender deserves a semester all by itself). Wings 3D is a dream, but it's too limited for anything but the simplest models. And UV mapping with Wings never quite worked right.

Another problem: there's no adequate text, in my opinion. I've tried 3D Game Programming All in One, and Torque for Teens. Both of these are recipe books more than educational texts - they tell you which buttons to press, but seldom dig into the underlying principles (color and lighting models, for example, or how animation works. And what is a bitmap, anyway, and why are there different kinds?). And they both make reference to commercial products like 3DS Max and Milkshape, which I didn't have. Personally, I like Game Programmer's Guide to Torque the best - but my students aren't programmers for the most part, and they'd be lost.

Here is the syllabus I used with Torque for Teens:

Week Chapter Topic Evaluation
1 1 & 2 Games and Game Engines
2 4 Working with Torque quiz
3 5 Creating Landscapes
4 3D Models Using Wings3D quiz
5 Project Work project
6 6 Buildings & Interior Spaces
7 Mid-Term Project Work project
8 7 Creating Character Bodies quiz
9 Project Work project
10 8 Graphical User Interfaces
11 9 Audio and Special Effects quiz
12 10 Programming with TorqueScript
13-15 Final Project project

This seemed just about right, though as I said, there's a lot of Torque for Teens that we either skipped or lightly skimmed over. Ideally, if I can make Blender workable for beginners (a miracle!), I'd like to license the assets that come with Game Programmer's Guide to Torque, and write my own text. With care, a game class like this can be a great introduction to many aspects of computer science and software engineering, and it's a lot of fun to boot!

The choice of an editor is another matter. I've been working with jEdit, which is pretty good. But it could use a good TorqueScript debugger to find simple mistakes, and help manage projects. A good part of my class time was spent in triage, helping students find missing semicolons and the like. TorqueScript can be a good introduction to object oriented principles, but we need some good training wheels on the editor. Yes, I'm sure Torsion is great, but like I said, they held me to a budget of $0, and I just couldn't afford it. Community colleges tend to be strapped for cash. The challenge is to make that into a learning experience.