You will develop your ability to think critically about the new media artifacts you are likely to encounter online.

At the end of this course, you should be able to work in teams to

• design and write a simple text-based computer game (interactive fiction)
  
• design and create a simple 2D arcade game
  
• design and create an informative Flash site
  
• design and animate a 3D virtual scene
  
• create a custom level (a "mod") for Half-Life 2

In addition, you will work on your own to create two projects on a slightly larger scale. Project 1 will address some issue pertinent to Catholic Social Teaching. Project 2 may be on any theme, serious or otherwise.

No prior knowlege of computer programming is required.

I haven't been working with any of these tools for longer than six months. Inform 7 came out in April, The Games Factory 2 came out in July, and I only got an office computer with Flash 8 on it this past Friday (August 25). You will certainly run into problems that I won't be able to solve right away, or perhaps even at all.

While the class meets from 2-3:15, I will be happy to continue working with you after class if I don't have another commitment (and if nobody else has booked the room).

If you make a technical error on a literary close reading -- perhaps you omit a quotation mark, or you misspell an author's first name -- the result will still be an essay that your instructor can read and evaluate.

If you make a technical error on a computer program -- perhaps you omit a quotation mark, or you push the wrong key, or the development tool is in the wrong mode when you push the key that would otherwise be the right key -- the consequences will likey be far more severe. You won't fry your computer or unleash a virus that will take over the world, but you might end up losing hours or even days worth of work.

• Get in the habit of saving your work whenever you're about to try something new, so that if you don't like the results you can go back to the previous version.
• Rather than save over the previous version of your file, save your work under a new name each time.
• Keep a project log, so that if you return to your project after spending a few days away from it, you remember what you were working on. Make a prioritized list of high priority tasks, middle priority tasks, and things that would be nice if you had the time. I once spent an entire day looking for 3D models of trees that are prettier than the ones that came with Half-Life 2. I mentioned my desire for better trees on my weblog, and from out of the blue a student I had taught four years ago at my previous job left a comment telling me where I could download prettier trees. But before long, I realized I didn't want to work on an outdoor scene anymore, and I scrapped my project to start on a windowless indoor scene. I'm happy to have the trees for when I might need them in the future, but truth be told I wasted a lot of time on what turned out to be a very minor detail.
• Learn to make one change at a time, and after each change, check to see whether your project still works. If you are working on three different areas at once, and you do something that breaks your project, you'll have a lot of detective work to do. (Sometimes when I run into an error I can't understand, I make another version of the project, and slice and hack away. If I cut a section and the error disappears, then I know that something in the section I just cut was causing the error.)