That time of the year is here again. Several organizations are beginning their contests for web design, video game design, multimedia, and graphics. I have added a tag in the web resources labeled contests. If you are interested in competing in any of these, regardless of grade level or program area, please let Mr. Statucki know.
For those of you who use RSS feeds and would like to follow some design blogs, this link by Six Revisions lists some of their popular blogs to follow and other additional resources about design.
For those of you who are looking for different ideas for designs to create in Illustrator, I have added several Illustrator tutorial websites to the class web resources.
Here is a link to help with the keyboard shortcuts:
I was going through some of my RSS feeds from blogs that I follow and game across a link about Portable Python. While I was reading about Portable Python, I noticed a link for Firaxis Games. On the left side of their blog is a section about wanting a career in gaming. I started reading the page and found yet another link to a 2008 Career Guide by Game Developer Magazine. With a little more searching, I found a 2009 Career Guide which can be accessed here. It is 104 pages long and I have not read the entire guide, but for those of you interested in careers in game design, let me know what you think of the guide.
Monday, September 14th will be the first official meeting of Future Business Leaders of America. The meeting will start at 2:00 in room C126. The first meeting will focus on what is FBLA and collecting student information.
Information about SkillsUSA and TSA will be coming up soon. In addition, at the SWCTA Open House all parents will receive a letter explaining the importance of being involved in Career Technical Student Organizations at SWCTA and the differences between the three main CTSOs being offered at SWCTA.
I hope that everyone had a great Labor Day weekend. This is actually the first time that I have been on a computer since 2:00 on Friday afternoon. This may have been the longest I have been away from my computer in a long time. I did have a good weekend despite my lack of technology.
At first glance, it looks like all classes are participating with the class wiki. Please make sure that you are adding relevant, original information without copying and pasting from other sites.
All classes should be working on projects this week and beginning to use relevant software in class.
All of the classes will spend time on Monday and Tuesday going through the class procedures since my procedures are slightly different with computers in the room. In addition, all classes will discuss student portfolio as it is an integral part of your curriculum at Southwest CTA. Here’s a preview of what is ahead this week:
Computer Graphics – Introduction to the elements and principles of design.
3D Animations and Graphics – Introduction to the elements and principles of design.
Game Technology Programming – Game genres, game platforms, and game development theory
Website Science – Netiquette, cyber ethics, and copyright law
It was a great first week of school. All of the classes managed to go on “field trips” to the computer lab across the hall to take pretests and fill out student information forms. For those of you who liked the 15 foot journey to room C102, I hate to disappoint you, but there will not be any more trips over this week.
On Friday, with the help of the school’s ECS, we moved the iMacs to our current classroom. The Macs scheduled to be in our classroom are not expected to arrive this week so we moved the computers to our room.
In addition to the field trips across the hall, all of the classes worked on at least one scenario situation to begin thinking about designs, video games, or web sites before actually creating them. The sophomore classes began some research on Career Technical Student Organizations (CTSOs) that we may have on campus. More details on how to get involved with these CTSOs will be coming soon.
I hope everyone is enjoying the start of the weekend. I will try and post tomorrow with a preview of next week.
It has been a great first three days to the school year. Regardless of which class you are in, you have been asking great questions. For the rest of the week, we will take a pretest in all classes to see where you are at. These pretests are not for a grade, but will help me establish a baseline for your current abilities.
A couple of reminders, course expectations are due on September 4th. In addition, if you did not submit the pink form that was given to you on the first day of school, you need to do so as soon as possible. This form allows you to get onto the network and computers at school.