Tuesday, February 16

I woke up early and left thinking about the classes I am going to run today. As soon as I got to Arcaa I was thrown into conversations and meetings.

I had a long conversation with Nathalie about my pedagogical certificate and about my forthcoming grant application. Both were fruitful. Later she sent annotated copies of my drafts back to me, and the annotations were extremely useful.

At 9:15 I started Block 2 of Structuring Information and we looked at XML schema. Most of the class were baffled at the beginning but almost all of them had got it by the end. The exercises took most people thirty or forty minutes. One student took approximately three minutes of each of them. She had never done this before before she got it immediately.

I had a meeting with Liisa over a lunch of mackerel and potato salad, and then I started Games Design. I got it started with a short talk and an exercise, which the students are doing now.

The students have forty five minutes to read another student’s work and to prepare a five to ten minute lecture based on it. I am sitting make notes about my meeting with Liisa and looking out of the window. The sun is up, the shadows are long, and the snow on the slop is covered in prints from humans and animals. Notes completed, I am having a Skype meeting with Jutta

Soon I will go back and video the four ten minutes talks, which vary from two minutes to about six. We will then discuss the issues they raise and approach some of these by asking a practical question: how would we deliberately design a bad game? What would we inclue and what would we leave out? Finally I will ask each group to redraft its script and upload it to the class archive. I will save the videos.