A bit about my teaching work

I have had three separate jobs as a teacher

First as a TA programming for an Unreal game development course at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign(UIUC) during undergrad where I worked to design assignments for students, create starting Unreal templates for those assignments, mentored project groups, and gave lectures on game design fundamentals and documentation. 

Then over the summer I taught high schoolers looking to get their introduction to game development in Unity at the National High School Game Academy(NHSGA). I had to  develop 13 90 minute lectures on game programming and design, then mentor students through recreating an arcade game with their own original art and small modifications over a week, before guiding them through the process of pitching and creating their first original game over the course of two weeks. Seeing these kids get a real picture of how game development works and learning to love it has been a highlight of my career.

Lastly, I TAed for an introduction to game design at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center(ETC). This was the first time the course was run so I worked to develop, test, and refine a new curriculum from the ground up. Designing assignments, creating and giving multiple lectures, and mentoring students through the creation of multiple games over the course of a semester.

There is kind of no better way to understand your design process then to try and reach it to someone else, you know?

The advice you give that puts someone on completely the wrong course. Or the advice that finally makes something click. Or finding out the times where advice doesn’t work at all and you have to set up situations for them to fail at it as fast as possible before figuring it out themselves.

You are ultimately trying to teach a new fledgling designer how to find their own process, and each student is a completely new challenge that makes you think about what is best for them above all else.

These experiences also helped me to develop one of the most important skills for a designer to have… communication

We have to communicate our work designs to other people who either need to work off it or implement it. Whether in meetings, or one or ones, or through design documentation. And people just getting into the field will test your communication abilities to the limits as you must make sure to avoid jargon, be abundantly clear, patient, and be ready to answer any questions they have. Because if you don’t they won’t learn.