Cheers,

And that’s the question to ask when you’re auditioning a program: does it meet the needs of industry? (Meaning the employers who hire people) Forget whether or not the program seems “fun”.

Go check out Teletoon, YTV, TVOKids and CBCkids before cocking your eyebrow at me … their sites are packed with Flash games and bleeding-edge web content. A little bit of Googling can save a lot of face.

i think it’s fine for a community college in Ontario to offer a program in scuba diving. There are some applications here in Ontario – you can join the marine unit of the police or the RCMP, you can be an instructor to people going on vacation to sunnier, more ocean-y locales – that type of thing. But it would be very suspicious if every community college and every University in Ontario were to suddenly offer a diving program, once diving became the “in” thing.

I hope this sheds a little more light on at least one of the Ontario Colleges that is pumping out grads ready to work in a production environment. I have classmates from all over the world, Many from outside of Canada one as far away as Russia and another The Cayman Islands. Which leads me to believe that just because a college is in a city where say the “automotive industry” is the biggest employer, doesn’t mean that the college should decide not to offer programs outside of the automotive industry… And, if the college program is a good one, people will come from all over the world to take it. From a students point of view the professors and coordinators of a program are the ones who make or break the program. At Fanshawe, at least in the Multimedia, Advanced Interactive Multimedia, and Advanced 3d programs we just happen to be lucky enough to have the best around…

Cheers,

UOIT is in Oshawa. Oshawa is Canada’s Detroit – a car town. UOIT teaches, among other things, robotics, which is a very logical fit, since many of the manufacturing plants in Oshawa and other nearby cities use robots for assembly. That so many Ontario colleges are supposedly priming students for jobs in video game console shops when those jobs don’t really exist here is where the logic breaks down for me.

Cheers,

In Canada, we generally have two post-secondary institutions: University and college. The US equivalent, i think, is college and community college. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but it’s generally expected that colleges teach trades, while Universities teach what you’re talking about: theory, foundation, understanding, empathy … middle-management bullshit. If you want to be a plumber, you go to college, take a program called “plumbing”, intern, get your ticket, and become a plumber. There are a few exceptions, like teaching, but no one goes to University to become a political scientist. You take polisci to be in that realm of study, and get a job related to polisci. But you go to college and you definitely DO take a program called “i wanna be a electrician” and then you intern and then you write your ticket, and then you become a electrician and do electrician stuff.

Other programs at the college in my home town include sports management (i wanna be a sports manager!), millwrighting (i wanna be a millwright!) etc etc.

So it’s not completely bizarre to think that you would go to college, take a computer game designer program, and become a computer game designer. That’s the expectation that college customers have: take this, so you can do that. This touchy-feely exploration of education is really more reserved for Universities here. University customers’ incomes are typically higher, and they can spend more time farting around trying to find themselves. For college customers, it’s “i need to have a muh-friggin’ job when these 2/3/4 years are over.”

i believe that you absolutely can and should tie learning to specific tools. When you train in 3d animation software, you don’t learn general 3d software. You learn Maya. (Or Max, or both). You don’t usually learn ALL 3d programs, and you don’t usually dabble in a bunch of them, because that’s not helping anybody. You learn Maya. Maya’s been around for at least 15 years.

Despite the course title, you don’t learn non-linear video editing. You learn Final Cut Pro. Prior to that, you may have learned Avid. Then the industry switched over. Avid guys were no longer finding work, so colleges responded and taught what the industry wanted students to learn.

So i see no problem with colleges identifying the needs of industry and teaching to those needs. i don’t hear ANYONE saying “well, who knows where Maya’s gonna be in five years? Let’s not put all our eggs in one basket here.” But i do hear that about Flash. All the time. It’s long been treated as this baby program that will eventually be supplanted by something better. But i’ve been making a very decent living at it for ten years now. If the colleges had amped up their Flash instruction five years ago, when i started advising on their industry panels, their current crop of grads would be very gainfully employed and we wouldn’t have this dearth of Flash people in the industry. But no … let’s teach them useless animated fly-throughs in Unreal Engine.

Fun fact: not a single shop i know in Toronto uses Unreal to build their games. Nearly EVERY shop i know in Toronto uses Flash. What the Hell is going on?

College doesn’t serve industry. And that’s exactly the problem.

I have to say I strong disagree with the general sentiment expressed in this article. You are blaming colleges for not teaching certain technologies for which there is demand (e.g. flash) and for teaching certain technologies for which there is no demand locally (e.g. 3D modelling software or game engines).

I think both of those situations are the problem.

It is obvious that colleges are increasingly driven by market demand. They are not asking themselves how to train future professionals. They are asking themselves what is it that kids think they want to learn. Kids are lured by sexy AAA game titles. Colleges are just blindly giving them what they want. They’ll teach them how to use 3DS Max or Unreal Engine. This is doing a disservice to those kids and to the industry.

Colleges need to take responsibility. If kids want to get into the video game industry, colleges should educate them that computer science or art or animation, are the ways to go. They shouldn’t be creating these fluffy video game programs that teach superficial skills.

Whether you teach students how to use Unreal Engine or Flash, those students are not being prepared for industry. The ways in which these technologies are taught are technology-specific. Students are taught to follow some order of steps to achieve some expected result. Students need to be taught how to invent the order steps to achieve some expected result instead. Because when the technology changes, without an understanding of the principles underneath it, and without an ability to be innovative, these students will be of no use to anyone. Furthermore, technology moves fast, so even if you teach them programming using Flash, by the time they graduate, Flash could be dead… it happened to Cobol… why not Flash? If they don’t understand the principles of programming, they may have to return to school just to pick up a new set of technologies.

Colleges need to teach foundations.. and foundations take years to learn. Programmers need to learn math, physics, logic, grammar and syntax, algorithm design and analysis, etc. Not sexy stuff, but necessary stuff. Artists need to perspective, color theory, anatomy, etc. Again, not sexy stuff, but necessary stuff. Teach this… and these students can discover what they want to do and learn the tools to do it in no time flat. Maybe in their final year, introduce some practical courses, like Flash programming. But teaching people new to programming how to make a game in Flash or Unreal Engine isn’t doing anyone a favour. Likewise, teaching some new to being an artist how to do a cool 3D model in some fancy software isn’t doing anyone a favour either.

To sum up my diatribe… most new students don’t know what they want to learn… and industry doesn’t know what they want them to learn either (unless they can faithfully predict the future 3-4 years from now). So give the students a solid foundation of knowledge… then those students can figure out what they want to do… and if at the end of the day, they want to be an independent flash game developer… than that is their choice. Or if at the end of the day, they want to be a cog in the wheel at a AAA studio and move away from Ontario to get that job… that too is their choice. Because all though I didn’t touch on this much, education is a personal journey of self-discovery. Schools shouldn’t be trying to satisfy industry either (local or afar). They should be giving students a well rounded education so that a student can choose their own destiny, whatever that may be, regardless if anyone here in Ontario thinks its useful.

Reading the second article now, funny I was stilling in class, learning cloud computing in a Game Development program and was checking on TOJam and the site was down for like 1 minutes for me and just a few google results down I see something Tojam and somethings missing, which lead me to that article then second section a link to this article. Talk about chance.

You can learn those courses, but really it isn’t useful.

C
C++
C#
Java
JSP
XNA
SQL Server
Oracle
Access
Word
Excel
Powerpoint
Flash
Flex
Cloud Computing
ASP.Net
.Net Remoting

This list is in no sorted order and contains only a sample of what my program covered, there are some overlaps in programming languages, but the use was different.

How can you possibly *learn* those 20-30 technologies? Sounds more like a summary program like the CFC, rather than a program where you can actually digest knowledge and learn how to use the software.

With technology changing so quickly, i understand why colleges are reticent to building courses around specific tools … but at some point, it becomes necessary. Flash is 10-15 years old at this point. When you take bus-driving lessons, you’re not taught to operate a variety of passenger vehicles including trains and hovercrafts. You learn how to drive a damned bus.

Currently the Game Development only differs by 6 courses from the Software Engineering Stream. We currently have courses teach not 1 or 2 technologies, but 20-30 technologies throughout the program.

ALso looking forward to TOJam, first year I will be going, looking forward to being Missing.

What really scares me about the console gaming scenario: over-dependence on a highly specialized and under-diversified (in Toronto) industry. I can recall a time when classical animators were being pumped out of Sheridan like nobody’s business…and then Disney pulled out of Toronto…

Build the pyramid from flash instead!! yaaayy!!

now …

let’s make some games !! yaaya!!

oh wait.

it’s still a pyramid scheme of misery, but now it runs on 99% of computers.
Liking your highly niche industry is called cognitive dissonance.

Why are film people generally assh*les?
cuz pain is temporary and film is forever.

Why are developers generally assh*les?
cuz development is painful and takes forever.

do what you love or don’t do it, there is room for everyone.

Wanna be a game developer> OPenCoursewareMIT is free, gamedev.net is free
you don’t even need to buy flash, you can use
http://www.flashdevelop.org/wikidocs/index.php?title=Main_Page or whatever.
cartoonsmart.com is cheap enough.

Schools are about community.

Why, the first time my Frat brothers and I destroyed an Amiga with bats high out of our minds on bytecode, that was some learnin’

It’s the “jobs at any and all costs” policy in this country that drives me nuts. These aren’t even *good* jobs. They pay less than what skilled labourers make (or at least used to make), they’re non union, lots of unpaid overtime, designed to grind up young people and spit them out as bitter and jaded 30-year-olds with few real career prospects. Then the jaded 30-year-olds go and start their own console development company to grind up the next batch of college grads. It’s like a pyramid scheme of misery.

I don’t worry about people who look down their noses at Flash anymore. I usually respond with “Yeah, I’d love to work on Prince of Persia 4 but I can’t afford the PAY CUT!”

FYI – that works on snobs in the visual effects industry too.

Can’t wait to read it. :)

Oh, and give me a deal on a flash course – I’d love to come learn from you. ;)

Teaching a Flash course at the college level has been very eye-opening. i learned that colleges alone aren’t to blame – the roots run deep. More on that soon.

Flash isn’t the only dissapointig section of the Ontario education system, web design and development is also trailing far behind. I’m hoping to go back and be able to change a bit of that, and teach them something useful. As apposed to making them plagerize for a grade.

Good on you sir. I can’t wait to read what you’re up to next.