New Zealand e-fellow Project

I am very pleased to announce that Unity have agreed to support my New Zealand based education research project for 2007.

I have been awarded an e-fellowship for 2007, which means I have a years release from teaching at Hagley Community College in Christchurch, in order to conduct a research project into 3d gaming in schools (with embedded learning objectives).

I have been teaching Maya for several years here to Senior Secondary school students (age 17+) and we are now introducing a Game design course for 2007. Students will help build the game and the evaluations will occur in other classrooms.

The project will be based around a New Zealand history strand in the curriculum, focusing on the Gallipoli Campaign of 1915 where the acronym ANZAC became popular.

The research project starts in January 2007 and will also involve Canterbury University as another project partner.

Unity will be our Game Engine of choice...

so a very big Thank You to Unity for your support... and I look forward to a great year next year...


-Regards

Gavin Hewitt

 

Gavin is my tutor and a good one at that. Using Unity from scratch this year has been a buzz, to the point that I brought a copy myself. This project is going to Rock, and hopefully It opens up job opportunities for myself and others, as well as establishing Christchurch (it's a place not some kind of extremist religious camp) and Hagley College as a kind of brain for game development.

This is all seriously fantastic stuff. I cant wait.
AC

 

Hey Gavin and AC -

I am just starting to look into Unity this summer holidays, and have been pretty stoked so far. Just out of interest, how did the E-Fellowship go? Are you going to publish your experience in Computers in NZ Schools?

Cheers, MattThomas

 

At this stage I intend returning to Hagley for more Maya-Unity goodness. I highly recommend it. Gavin will probably swing by and give you his take on the eFellowship. Personally I based my design folio around the Gallipolli idea and will continue with a run and gun approach this year.

http://deepwater3d.kol.co.nz/Design/Design.htm

Its a ton of work making a WW1 type game. I focussed last year on getting a really strong pipeline for lightmapping, with heaps of objects, and getting better at modelling and texturing.

A lot of people with no 3d experience whatsoever had a crack at game assets, and everyone got somewhere down that path. I enjoyed helping my classmates build their first unity scene-that is very rewarding.

Where abouts are you? if you are in Chch, and want to meet up, drop me a private message.

Cheers
AaronC

 

Hey Aaron -

Thanks for the quick response!!! Have had a bit of a look at your deepwater3d website and am in awe.

I am a Primary School teacher at Selwyn Ridge in Tauranga, so meeting up to steal tips is probably not going to happen! I have been developing flash based games and teaching DLOs for a bit now, but am pretty excited about Unity. Have just been looking at it over the Summer hols. I have no experience at all in 3D design or game development, but it is pretty cool from what I've played with so far.

My class (six year olds) are going to freak out when we start getting into this stuff!

Are you planning to make a career out of this?

Cheers for the response again, MattThomas

 

Congratulations! I am a kiwi currently in Australia but I specialize in games for history and heritage and I'll be teaching Unity at UNSW this semester; if you have any questions after looking at nzerik.googlepages.com then email me, I'd be happy to answer any questions. You have a great project there.