School of interactive design

floatingwoo

Has anybody here ever gone through this course? Or a course like it. I see they teach game salad ,corona and unity for 2d games. My kid is now 12 and he's really into learning all aspects of game making. I have a good handle on graphics and animation but I'm weak on programming skills. He keeps coming back to this school but it looks like the most expensive on line....any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Armelline

That looks like a huge amount of money for what seems to be a fairly basic course. Unless he's going to make full use of all the units, I'd recommend Jamie Cross' course or the many free tutorials on Youtube rather than spending $1500. Hell, if that's a viable price I may have to make a course myself...

tatiang

I'm not familiar with it but I'd want to see the quality of the videos before spending $1500 on something like that. I couldn't find any sample videos... they all seem to require an account but I would guess they have a trial login or something along those lines. Depending on how your son learns best, an in-person class might be better. Then again, $1500 for a year is cheap compared to months of classes.

Most GameSalad (or game design/coding in general) classes my students have signed up for have been a lot of fun for them but not very well crafted in my opinion. They just barely scrape the surface of learning GameSalad. An example is a very bright student who was motivated to create his own game and took a summer camp in GameSalad from a popular company near Silicon Valley and when he took my GameSalad elective after that he showed up with a built-in template that he had modified to keep score. That was the only change to the basic template after two weeks of intensive study. I'm not sure what they were teaching him, to be honest. I was able to add much more to his skill set in about the first three hours of my class.

Is your son fairly independent in his learning? There are so many free videos online, some of them very good, that you'd have to have a good reason for purchasing a set of videos. I see that it also includes same-day support ("Students can contact our experienced staff of game designers, artists, and computer animators with any questions they have through email, or live chat when available. We always answer any questions our students have the same day."), which seems like a good thing for a 12 year-old. Send them a question from your son and check their response to see the caliber of information they are sending out. If they answer "Well, you can make a character move faster by watching our video #82," then I'm not sure if the support is worth the cost but if it's more involved than that, sure.

Edit: until @Armelline and I team up for our $3,000 LearnGameSaladGood video course, you're welcome to have your son try out my free tutorials. I have a link in my signature. I also have another set of tutorials that include how to make an Asteroids game, which is what I require of my 12 & 13 year old students, at http://tinyurl.com/GoGameSalad (start at video #21 "ASTEROIDS #1 Sample Finished Game").

BBEnk

$1500 to learn how to make Flappy Bird in 1 hour,lol

You might check out 3D buzz they don't do Gamesalad but have some videos on others.

http://www.3dbuzz.com

Armelline

Hell, for $1500 you could buy 50 hours of one-on-one tuition from me, via Skype (or in person if you happen to be geographically close). (Or 40 hours with materials prepared.) So for your son to really get value out of that course he'd need to spend at least 50 hours watching those videos.

I recently got approached to create a scheme of work for a GameSalad course to be taught to students. I wrote a very, very comprehensive SoW based on the potential clients requirements. In the end the price I quoted to produce the whole thing was higher than he was willing to pay and I didn't hear from him again after quoting it, but it did get me really thinking about how to teach GameSalad. I was a teacher for nearly a decade and it always seemed to make sense to combine my GameSalad expertise with my previous training. Maybe one day I will!

floatingwoo

Wow ! You guys have been really helpful, I will look over everything you've mentioned and see what fits him best. BTW regarding what kind of student: 4.0, I turned him on to Khan Academy and he tore up the computer programming and math courses in about a month he's up to 270K Energy points. I'd have to say "self driven" is a good word to describe him. I'm looking for the best place for him to apply this new found knowledge and keep him inspired.Thanks again!