Hi. I'm Tim, Dr.T.
Chamillard, and I'll be your instructor for this course.
I'm an associate professor in
the Computer Science Department at the University of Colorado at
Colorado Springs where I teach a variety
of undergraduate game design and development courses.
I'm also the Program Director for
our Bachelor of Innovation in Game Design and Development Degree.
I spent five and a half years as an indie game
Developer in a company that I started with my two sons.
And now I spend my time doing
the indie game development in my one-man company, Burning Teddy.
So why Dr. T?
Well my name is Tim and I am a doctor even though I'm not the kind who helps people,
but that's not really it.
Here in the US, high school students are taught to
call their teachers Mr. Jones or Mrs. Smith and so on.
And I teach a lot of freshmen students.
So the first time one of my students raises her hand and says Mr. Tim,
Mr. T, everyone knows that's wrong.
So in case you need a visual reminder I am Dr. T,
I'm not Mr. T.
This is a five-week course and four weeks of the course have new material in them and
the final week consists of completing
reviews of other learners' work and taking a final exam.
So speaking of peer reviews,
there are four of them throughout the course and they're worth a total of 80%, 20% each.
And you can think of these as programming assignments.
But in Coursera programming assignments regularly mean they're automatically graded.
And we're not doing it that way in this course
because regularly especially toward the end of the course,
you'll be providing games for other people to
play and that's hard to automate the grading for that.
The other 20% is for that final exam that is
a multiple choice exam that you will take in the last week of the course.
There are also 20 exercises to give you lots of
practice programming because practice is so important as you learn to program.
They're not worth points but you'll probably need to do them to succeed in the course.
And finally, there are some practice quizzes along the way that you
can take just to sort of test your understanding of the material.
They're also not worth points but they're also
worth making sure you understand the correct answers.
Okay, here is a list of the topics we'll cover in the course.
Don't worry about the details because we'll
of course covered the details as we go week to week.
But this gives you an overview of the things we'll discuss in the course.
There is a book for the course.
It is recommended not required.
And full disclosure I wrote it.
There are actually two versions of the book.
One for MonoDevelop and one for Visual Studio.
So once you get to Lesson Two in the first week and you
watch the video lecture about picking your development environment,
once you've decided which development environment
you want to use to do your C-Sharp coding,
you can go purchase the appropriate version of the book if you choose to do so.
It's only available on Amazon.
It is available as an eBook for Kindle and there are free Kindle readers for PC and Mac.
There is a paperback version available but only buy that if you really want to.
It's super expensive to print a large full color paperback book.
So that would cost you a lot more.
If you can live in the eBook,
just buy the eBook.
The book is recommended not required.
You're making a money versus time trade off
here because things that you could easily look up in the book,
you might spend more time trying to find out if you don't buy the book,
searching the web and so on.
So that's totally your choice whether you want
the convenience of the book or you want to spend more time looking stuff up.
The other thing that you should consider is the topics covered in the book
are going to be covered in the first three courses in the specialization.
So if you need to justify the cost of the book you
can think of it as amortized across three courses.
This is a beginning programming course.
And what that means is I don't assume you have ever programmed before.
We're going to start at the very beginning and work our way up from there.
I will point out though that beginning is not the same as easy.
So think about the first time you rode a bike.
As you're learning to ride a bike,
you're a beginning bike rider.
Nobody assumed you knew how to ride a bike when you started trying to ride a bike,
but it wasn't easy either.
So you should think about this course that way.
If you've never programmed before,
it's not going to be easy.
But I'm giving you everything you need to work your way up
from a no knowledge about programming to be able to do the course.
The trick or one of the trick is to practice, practice, practice.
Right? And so that's why there are so many exercises and so on,
because the way to learn programming is to practice programming.
Frustration is a totally normal part of the process.
You might find yourself swearing once in
a while as you try to learn how to do this stuff.
That is natural. It never,
nobody is born as a programmer.
I don't care what they tell you.
We all have to struggle along the way to learn how to do it.
So, don't feel bad or stupid if you're struggling because
that's just part of the process of learning how to do a hard thing.
There is help, right?
You can post questions on the course forums to get help from your fellow students.
My experience has been people are really helpful to each other.
So feel free to jump on and ask questions and
help each other as you sort of work through this stuff together.
You can surf the web if you need to, to look for stuff.
I we'll give you a big shocker of not everything on the web is true.
And so you might be better off checking the book
or posting on the forums versus finding some random mantra on the web.
But the web is always available as a way to research stuff.
Finally, in the first week I'm giving you a reading called the Course Topic Index.
So you should think about this as a book index where there's a list of
topics and at the back of the book the index has page numbers for those topics.
But I'm going to provide you with links to go to
specific videos at specific time points
in those videos where I address that particular topic.
So you can go to the course topic index and say,
"I've got to learn how to declare a variable."
Don't worry if you don't know what those words mean yet. We'll get there.
But if you go there,
I'll have a link where I show you in a video how to declare a variable.
And you can just click that link and then you can watch that snippet of
the video to find out how to do that thing.
So that's another source of help for you
as you work your way through the material in this course.
There's going to be a lot of fun.
It'll be hard work, but it's a lot of fun.
So, let's get to it. Cheers.