There are several Universities teaching Unity 2.xx or even Unity 1.0, older C#, using Visual Studio 2003 (Goodness!).
How do you hint to them they need to update their syllabus, update their UDK (from 1.1 !!!), update their Unity from 2.xx to 4.3, update their Maya and/or update their 3D max too?
I’m horrified Universities still teach using Unity 2! You cannot even download Unity 2.0 anymore and they should not be advertising instructor-lead accredited courses for Year 2013 Dec, Jan, Feb, Mar semester. They need to update their course syllabus to new features found in Unity 4 or new course on 2D features found in Unity 4.3!
I’m not at all surprised. Universities are always behind. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. When it comes to technology, Universities have to have lesson plans and they have to evaluate the technology they’re going to teach and use. It’s sometimes outdated by the time it ever hits the classroom. This is the nature of technology. And sometimes Universities are just stuck teaching old stuff because of staff and administrators that have ties to a specific technology / background.
When I started College, of course C# and .NET didn’t exist… but I was expecting at the time to be learning a good amount of C++. Instead I learned bits of:
Cobol, Fortran, Pascal and even Assembler. After a brief hiatus I returned to college… at this time .NET was out but they were attempting to teach VB .NET with a teacher who had a C++ background and knew nothing about .NET. It was in many ways worse than just learning it on your own.
That being said… you can’t expect to learn the newest technologies in a general college / university. You are, however, going to learn the concepts and fundamentals. As a professional developer I’ve done far more learning in the field than I ever did in College. Now… if you do want to keep fairly up with new tech then you have to go to a specific technical institute like ITT.
However, businesses are looking more and more for “general purpose” folks. This is why I focused on Business Management and Information Systems (BMIS) even though I knew I was going to be a programmer. The extra BM courses definitely helped me advance my career much more swiftly.
We can’t be too specific about the issue, but anyway, if someone comes here looking for a job and has no ability to upgrade their skills to use Unity latest or had prior experience with Unity 2.0 but not Unity 3.xx or Unity 4.xx. I’ll just point them to this thread.
My college teaches the first game programming class using Directx 11 with c++ so that we understand how it all works and then set us loose to use the engine we want for the advance class(I used unity). They try to teach the latest stuff in the computing and are pretty good at keeping up. I hope thats more of the norm than the exception
There are good universities and there are bad universities, as always. Teaching obsolete ideas is a common sign of a bad university.
Though having said that, don’t overestimate the importance of the technology. If you’re trying to teach general principles of game development, 3D art, etc, then the exact programs you use to do that are often really not very important.
I’m horrified universities are teaching Unity unless it’s a minor tool used to demonstrate physics math equations effects and in that case old versions of Unity are sufficient.
LOL, the old versions also discourage attempts of theft of the SW license keys.
In my highschool our tech classes are faaaar behind in the programs we use.
In my 3D Digital Design we use Lightwave 8.
Computer Arts Graphics we’re using Photoshop 6, not cs6.
Web Page Design we’re learning simple/old versions of html using a book from 1995 or some sort.
The only up to date program we have is our Engineering classes in which we have Autocad 2013.
Overall I do believe this is only Highschool, so it wouldn’t so important as for most students who take these classes are merely never going to use these skills in their future careers, but sometime I do wish they would have advance and up to date programs.
As for the university, I do think it’s a shame they’re using old versions, and should definitely update.
When I did a course on assembler programming at University the machines we used in the lab had 8" disk drives. I never knew such a thing existed. And yeah, we got taught 8080 assembler, which seemed a bit old, given that I was programming in 68000 in my spare time on my Atari 1040ST, with its 3.5" disc drive.
This is exactly what I was thinking. Depending on what’s being taught it may make little or no difference.
You’ve hit the nail on the head here in regards to what’s important, but what you’re saying seems to imply that you’re not handling it particularly well? If someone has done some work in Unity 2 and applies for a job and has the ability to upgrade their skills on the go… what’s the problem? And if they don’t have the skill to learn tools on the fly then it has nothing to do with the tools they were taught with at university. In fact, if they learned Unity 2 at uni and have done any other work with the tool, including playing around with their own hobby/learning projects, then chances are they they’ve got more experience in upgrading their own skills than someone who was taught in the latest version.
If I were looking at courses to teach Unity I wouldn’t be worried about them teaching version specific stuff. That will change, constantly. What they need to learn is how to work things out for themselves in the context of the engine’s high level design, performance testing, and investigating/managing platform-specific issues. And older versions could actually be better for that, as it does less stuff for you and thus has more learning opportunities, less stuff is handled by magic. For instance, I learned about occlusion culling by writing my own occlusion culling system for Unity 2, where in Unity 3+ that’s something you just get out of the box.
I agree that they should most likely use up to date software, but not because I think there’s any problem with the potential learning outcomes from the old stuff.
From the reactions I’ve seen on this thread, I think it is OK if Universities and colleges teach Unity 2.0.
If some people find it difficult to upgrade their skills after that and need to use Unity 2.0 instead of Unity 4.3, or they find themselves unable to upgrade their skills quickly or adjust to Unity 4.3, there’s nothing I can do about it.
Do people have problems downloading and installing the free version of Unity 4.3? What do other people on the forum do after they finish their education? If you are looking for a job that requires intermediate experience with Unity, is the Unity free version is sufficient for people to use and learn?
Absolutely. In fact, plenty of the innovations that I bring to my workplace as a lead developer come from playing around with the free version of Unity on my own hobby projects. Unless you need Pro-level features like render textures or fall under the income clause of the free license it’s plenty to do the vast majority of whatever you might want to do.
Thats incredible especially when you consider how much universities cost, my brothers girlfriend is paying 10k for her masters and its only 1 year- and thats in canada where its cheap.
someone has to know a lot about it before they can teach it, and theres all kind of approvals and certifications they have to do for courses. they haven’t really adapted that process to a fast changing field like technology, if you think of traditional university programs that don’t change as fast and information from a few years ago is still very relevant.
thats why one of the important things to teach is not the information itself, but how to actually learn and study things so that you can continue to grow after you leave school.