In that regard, Unity is probably easier on both the teacher and the student. In contrast, they catch on to the actions of creating an object, adding a code file, and writing the code for said object very quickly. I think the reason is, as I mentioned, kids don’t intuitively get how Blueprint communication works because it’s arbitrary actions of connecting bubbles with lines to other bubbles. Unity…to my knowledge, I’m the only one in my district teaching Unreal. This new group seems to like this approach. This year, I’ve been doing Blueprints first and C++ sprinkled throughout while breaking down what Blueprint nodes look like on the backend to reinforce that visual/code relationship. Things like branching, variables, and functions were largely a mystery to them despite having used them throughout the year across several award-winning projects. The third group I taught Blueprints only they were split with many hungry for a deeper computer science experience, but they all lacked that ability to think in code. They hated it and several students begged to just write the code because they couldn’t wrap their heads around how Blueprints communicate. The second group I taught GML then Blueprints. The first group I taught C and later moved into Blueprints. Unreal is especially unfriendly with this because it makes passing references annoying while abstracting away sooo much via Blueprints. It tends to confuse new coders if that’s all they have. Almost no one uses it outside the gaming realm and visual scripting just doesn’t build the same connections in my experience. The largest hurdle is going to be time management.īut as ClockWorkOcean said, they won’t necessarily learn computer science skills in a way that is meaningful. There’s also some ways in which BPs don’t act like normal code, for instance loops often don’t wait for the exec pin to run before calling the next itteration. I’d say the main problem with teaching them via BP is that it’s not really applicable to ‘real life’ unless they want ot do something in gaming. Thanks so much for your help! I’m hoping this is an excellent fit! I know not every student will be interested in game design, so I will also be doing the MIT App Inventor curriculum in tandem with this one, so students have a choice! Other options will likely be available to, at least for the self-sufficient or motivated students. Unreal’s Blueprints on the other hand… seemed like a bit like a Block Coding dream for students interested in game design. I’ve also considered Unity with C#, but I get the sense that the non-C# portion of Unity wouldn’t build programming skills much, and it would take too long to get into the programming reasoning with C#, but I could be judging or viewing it wrong. I’ve also considered PyGame, but that program isn’t as exciting or provide as much ‘bang for your buck’ when it comes to programming time. Would Unreal Blueprints be sufficiently accessible and provide the programming reasoning opportunities? While plenty of classes use Java and Python too, there’s no penalty of block coding. This is a program agnostic course, that just requires the language teaches them… well, the principles! Block coding programs like Scratch and MIT App Inventor are rather common for final projects. This will be for Computer Science Principles. What do you think, could students learn all the major computer science principles by using Blueprints? Loops, Lists, etc, without it seeming overly contrived? That sounds amazingly cool! I’m not very familiar with it yet, but am prepared to put some work in if it fits with the course. I’d love to teach Unreal Blueprints in my CS Principles course next year.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |