Video Game Design/Developers

What is the greatest challenge facing your practice right now?

Right now my biggest challenge is dealing with a inordinate number of seniors in my intro classes. At best, they have a good time and cut into the number of potential students moving on to my level 2. At worst, they are completely unengaged, disruptive and chase away/derail students thus hurting my level 2 class.

Man, that stinks!

I have the opposite issue - Too many freshman who were placed in my class, not because they wanted to be there, but because they had holes in their schedule. I'm working to provide a wider range of classes in hopes that I have more options for students. I'd rather teach 6 different courses per semester mostly containing students that elected to be in the class, than to teach 2 different courses over 6 periods where there weren't enough students who signed up for the class, so large numbers of students who didn't want to be there were thrown into the mix.

Student apathy is a big issue in education. It's not a new issue, but it does feel like the % of apathetic students has increased.

One of my major obstacles is our course selection process for students. The paperwork listing the classes is almost always incorrect and CTE courses feel like an afterthought even though many of the CTE courses on my campus offer college credit and should be taken by our honors/AP kids. I'm on year 5+ of trying to fix registration, and fingers crossed, this year it might actually work.

This is huge for me too. Everyone talks about college and career readiness, but the state of it on the ground in many schools is appauling. Trying to form industry partnerships with game companies, who are taking a chance working with high schools, and then have a number of students who barely do any work, come on those trips or get some Capstone mentoring, it's embarassing. I get why game companies often wait to partner only with colleges. My principal asked me at the start of this year if I wanted to look into dual credit options. We are just down the road from the local community college so it would be a great option, but I said, not until you stop filling my classes full of kids who are not interested in Game Design. They barely function now, ramping up the academics would be a disaster.

My classes aren't full of kids like that, but have just enough of them, that it's hard to push them to work a little harder or faster because they just won't and slow the whole class down.

We are all facing similar challenges. I have Game Design 1 for juniors and Game Design 2 for seniors. I get students from the mod severe classes dumped into my Game Design 1 class bc they need an elective. They are not interested in Game Design. They are also used to being in class with 6-8 students and multiple paras. They come to my classes and I have 35-37 students and no paras. Most of those students cannot read, and certainly cannot follow video tutorials. I literally have no idea what to do for them. I've tried to meet with their teachers so I can present them with the curriculum I use, and ask them how to modify it for their students. I suspect they don't know how or have no idea how complex Game Design it, so they avoid me. I'm at the point I may give them literal coloring pages. I thought, maybe I could give them some self paced computer skills websites, but they cannot even use a mouse, let alone a keyboard. 

Other than that, I have some classes that are going well, it's not all bad, but the challenges this year are very different from the last few years.

I get a fair few sped students in my program, at one point I had a plug-in support section of my intro course which was a blast.

But every time I have had really strong support from the SPED department, it is crazy that they would drop mod/severe students into that course with 0 support.