Video Game Design/Developers

On a scale of 1 to 10, How hard would you describe your courses. 1 being a participation course, 10 being something extremely hard for a high school course.

My analog (intro) course starts as a 3 and ramps up to a 5 or 6 by the end of the course. It isn't "hard" in the classic sense, but the nature of the work makes it pretty hard for the less motivated to be successful.

My Graphics course (concentrator) is probably a 6-7. A lot of the difficulty comes from the fact that I force all of my students to take it and it is basically a digital art class, so my comp sci kids do grit their teeth through a bit of it. It gets pretty technical when we get to Blender, but it gets pretty tame after a while.

My Capstone course is a beast. it's probably a 8-9. Mostly because the kids that make it that far really reach for it. It's a pretty bog standard intro comp sci course at first, before they start making their own games.

My first year course is all analog games but does require a fair amount of writing at times (design docs, rules docs, etc.). A typical week is a 2-3 difficulty with spikes of 6-7 when big projects are due.

2nd year is programming in Unity and is probably a 4-5 difficulty most days when students are following along to tutorials online or from the textbook. When students work on their own projects in second semester difficulty can spike to a 10 depending on how borked their code base becomes and if they overscope, but my intention is to maintain a 7-8 during those phases.

3rd year is more programming plus marketing. Year started at a 7 but has been 9-10 for the past month as teams have a hard deadline of Friday at 3:00 pm to get their projects submitted to SkillsUSA.  Next week we will wind down to a 5 for a bit then try to finish the year at 8-9 when their final pitch presentations are due.

Ultimately I have found that the students that read instructions tend do not have too much difficulty (aside from the occasional programming problems) and those that don't read instructions definitely struggle.