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Introduction to Video Game Creation Summer Camp Hi, Ken here. This Summer I had new teaching experiences: I taught two Summer Camps to High Schoolers. The first was on Maya, the 3D modeling and animation software that I've used for twenty years or so now. I've used it mostly for doing visual effects for movies, but lately we here in the DMAE program have been using it to create content for video games that we author with Unity.

I was really stoked to see how eager the high school students were to navigate Maya's complex interface and workflow. A month after that camp, I taught a week's worth of Unity video game creation to another batch of students. Again, totally pleased with how unencumbered the students were with anxiety or timidity about having new software plunked down in front of them. : )

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Nonetheless, on the fifth day we were all pretty tired of learning, so I let the students work on either a new project or download free assets from the Unity Asset Store to add to game projects we'd created that week. Between answering their questions or helping them debug, I worked on a little "game" that is an homage to the old board game "Mousetrap", where you have a ball that rolls around a Rube-Goldberg-esque environment.