In this section, four participants in RES.3-003 Learn to Build Your Own Videogame with Unity Game Engine and Microsoft Kinect share their impressions of the workshop and offer advice to future participants.
Abraham, Professional
Impressions
This workshop puts the responsibility for learning on the learner. The instructors set that expectation from the get-go.
Advice
When working in teams, surround yourself with people who know things you don’t know. And make sure that the people you’re teaming with can use your very specific set of skills. For example, I teamed with people who were good at coding—a skill I haven’t developed as deeply as others in the workshop. As a complement to their coding skills, I offered project development knowledge. I identified risks and created a simple development pipeline so that we could get started with something tangible right way. I think my team members appreciated my ability to organize our work.
Workshop participants collaborating to complete a tutorial. (Image by H. Sharon Lin, MIT OpenCourseWare.)
Tyler, MIT student
Impressions
The workshop is very interactive. I was nervous, at first, about working in teams every day. But it went over really well and I enjoyed working with my teammates. It’s great that people from outside MIT participate because you get to benefit from their ideas. The more diversity, the better!
Advice
I would encourage more people to try this workshop. It’s not for credit—it’s a time to do something creative, something you truly enjoy.
Roseanne, Wellesley student
Impressions
I found the workshop fun. I really liked it. The hard part was just identifying your project ideas and figuring out what was doable—and what was not—in the allotted timeframe.
Advice
This workshop is good for people completely new to Unity. I don’t think participants need any particular preparation. If anything, participants might find it useful to do a little research about what you might want to use Unity for after the workshop.
Chris, Professional
Impressions
The collaboration in this workshop was good. Taking someone else’s idea that I thought I understood, and working together to figure out the possibilities associated with that idea was very exciting. The challenges were frustrating, but the discoveries were very rewarding.
Advice
One piece of advice for future participants is to make sure that the game you’re trying to build will work in any program. Your game should work fine with dice, paper, and pencils. If you rely too heavily on the technology, your game will break when the technology changes.
