Just interested to know… who is using Unity in an academic course of some description? Generally, do you find this Teaching board on the forum an adequate source of support for what you are doing or is there more we could do to help out?
Hands up if you have an answer!
Unity could purchase/license this guys videos
http://www.unity-tutorials.com/
That would be a good start …
Thanks
Thanks for the vote of support, shader!
Personally, I think the best thing to add to the teaching forum would be an FAQ that points to different academic and commercial locations for tutorials. That plus offer a section that outlines universities that currently license Unity for educational or lab purposes.
The latter one is focused more towards college students, but it’s still useful for Unity devs who’re looking to run a Unity event of some sort (like the Global Game Jam) and are looking for good locations.
As for the course… The college I’m currently at requires that all courses be taught according to the professor’s preferences, but the budget doesn’t allow for very much. Getting access to Unity for an entire classroom is pretty much impossible until the college adopts it onto the lab computers.
I’ve been lecturing (Not my daily Job!) about game technologies and general game making for over 4 years and this spring (2009) I did my first Unity workshop, which went pretty well. Almost got a “fully working” game. 
Because the time that is reserved for the workshop is so short, we can’t make any BIG production. So I don’t think you can do anything any better (for me anyways, cant say for others thou).
I usually have 2-4 days for theory and 4-6 days for the workshop (that includes design time) and this was no exception. The teams are usually big (over 6 people), so we do get something done.
Good question Andréééé. I am watching that post.
:lol:
We Brits are noted for our distinguished accents.
We francophone place a accent on everything. 
Do you add an “r” to everything, too? 8)
We Pirates are noted for that, actually.
Vous êtes un fin observateur à ce que je vois.
I am planning an environmental science course that will use Unity3d as a means to an end, for visualizing and modeling scientific problems. One thing this forum might help me and others with is to filter for materials that ease beginning level college student programmers towards unity programming success.
Thinking about some of the pedagogical issues:
An initial problem with unity is the format of the documentation. Many of us digital natives don’t realize that college students hate to read technical information on a computer screen. It’s weird but I hear it all the time. Despite the costs of paper textbooks they prefer them over online versions. A printable or even Kindle-friendly PDF version of the documentation would be nice.
Thinking about course materials I’ll really consider Will Goldstone’s book as required reading, as his jumping in and doing the thing approach is similar to my philosophy. My intent is to introduce Unity3d as a fast track tool and not an F16 that takes years to learn how to fly. Let them realize how complex it is in week 6 after the drop deadline has passed. (muhahahhah)
Some of the video training tutorials available for Unity3d are also very applicable to this course. Unfortunately students hate to watch anything technical that is not high resolution with good production values. Students can be a pain for sure but its all about attention and message. If the material format is distracting it takes up cognition “space” and the message and content doesn’t get delivered or gets poorly translated.
As this all develops I’ll try to send some of the more interesting observations towards this forum. I might be crazy to try this with Unity3d given its initial head-scratching seeming complexity so anything the forum can suggest would be useful. I think its going to be fun. Maybe.
I tried to read some paper programming books a while ago. It was a nightmare. After having been away from printed books for a while, I realized that you had to have ridiculous lighting to read something on a printed page. I could read them in the bathroom, but as they were designed to be companions to software, that did not work logistically. When at my computer, there was no way to both read and program at the same time, because the book had to be open, and it had to be at an angle appropriate for viewing.
I can not imagine somebody actually wanting to do this. Do you have a video of a student doing it in practice? I never figured out the solution, and sold the books.
I can offer my observation of students during study sessions and class/lab interactions. They spread out with a laptop, phone, food, Red Bull, Ipod, backpack and flattened out textbooks/ reference manuals. It’s impressive.
Ah, but then you run into the the “working in a space with other people” issue. As you might be able to guess from this photo, (although my keyboard, guitar, microphone, and drum kit are out of view), that kind of thing is a bit unrealistic for me. I’m out of school, but my girlfriend goes to university online. I was never able to get much work done in a lab.
That one also puzzles me. :?
Nice setup for unity3d work, it looks just like my 3dsMax station.
I require a lot of collaboration between my students. At first they grumble but most end up enjoying it. Our computer lab setup allows for pod-mode so small teams can work together. But it’s not for everyone. Also my courses don’t teach programming as the primary objective but just use it as a tool for thinking about environmental science problems. Only a few students get totally hard core on me and flail away at programming when they should be sleeping.
BTW, almost none of my students can afford the two monitor solution that you and I use. Their second monitor is the ultra-high resolution printed page in the book or reference material.
But anyway, what I have observed is that whatever works works. Eh?