Pay Attention Class!!

Well, here's something scary: I'm going to be helping "mold" the next generation of Media Developers at McKenzie College. It is mainly a Flash focused course (Egad, you're not using Silverlight? I would love to, but the tools are not quite there yet and it's still alpha, and there isn't a market here in New Brunswick for it yet. But as soon as it's ready, I'm going to start using it for Trimedia projects). We are going to teach them basics of color, lighting, art (we actually start them with pencil drawing and oil painting, we want "real" media developers first, digital second). Then we are going to teach them the basics of HTML, database (probably use MySQL, they are on iBooks), and then teach them C. Yes, you heard that right, C, not C#. We want to start with a language that doesn't require an understanding of OOAD and forces them to deal with types, control/flow, the basics. Then we will be moving to Flash and ActionScript 3.0 with a focus on Game Design in Flash. It should be interesting.

So for my fellow ASP.NET Addicts, whose ears are still ringing from hearing Apple and Flash, rather than their Microsoft counterparts, it wasn't for lack of trying. I suggested that we focus more on C#, ASP.NET, and SQL 2005, but McKenzie is a Adobe licensed training center with a deal with Apple to provide each student with a laptop, so there isn't much I could do :-) The bottom line is I finally get to have input into the training of students (instead of getting them after they come out of 13 months of programming school and don't even know what an Hashmap, Set, or List is. Come on schools, at least teach your students about some kind of Collection API because they will spend a great deal of their web developing career dealing with them).