got my teacher interested in unity

News & General Discussion
1

i am taking a computer science class (computer programing) and i showed my teacher unity and he may consider using with the class at the end of the semester.

though since he has never worked with unity and has not time to learn it i will have to make assignments for it.

2

Great work, Drazil!

Perhaps you can let your teacher know that Unity would be happy for him to contact us directly (by PM, e-mail or whatever) and we’ll do what we can to help get the course up and running.

3

I got introduced to Unity by a class in university, so getting teachers interested is definitely a good thing!

4

ok i may need help making the lessons. i am good with scripting in unity but i have no idea how to teach it.

5

I was thinking about telling my tech teacher about Unity, but decided against it.

Why?

Because I’m in 8th grade. And the kids in my class can’t even make a powerpoint… Let alone operate a game engine.

6

Sadly I know more about computers than my computer teacher at school. sigh

Thats sweet that your teach wants to know about Unity!

7

I imagine you have access to a computer lab, perhaps with a digital projector available. This is a great setup for teaching something like Unity.

If you have a few sessions then I would recommend spending the first one building a simple “game” by putting assets in a scene and adding components, linking script variables, etc. This should get across the idea that Unity has a “world” that you can fill up with objects and these objects can be made to do things by adding components. However, don’t introduce coding at this stage. Using physics is ideal because it gives objects a lot of interesting behaviour with no code and looks very impressive when you see it for the first time. Maybe you could use a game where there are piles of boxes that the player has to knock over by rolling a ball into them. You can build this up gradually:-

  • Add a playing surface to the scene (maybe show how to add a texture to a plane object).
  • Add a box.
  • Give the box physics by adding a rigidbody to it (show how the box will fall to the plane if it is up in the air).
  • Duplicate the box and show how the boxes can be stacked up realistically under physics.
  • Add a ball with a rigidbody and then add a pre-made control script that will roll the ball with the arrow keys.
  • Add a camera script and show how it can be linked to the ball in the inspector.
  • Various other additions (eg, walls around the scene to stop the ball rolling out, obstacles to avoid, etc).

With that out of the way, you will probably want to spend the rest of the sessions tackling a few simple aspects of scripting each time. Explain whatever concepts you want to put across and then give the students exercises based around them (and be prepared to walk around the room a lot to give help). It would be very motivating for the students if they could end up with something like a real game at the end of the course. However, it might be difficult to do that, depending on how much time you have and what progress you make.

Anyway, please keep us updated - it would be very interesting to see how you get on with this!