Student interns at Luma Animation
Hi Guys,
I want to share our experience with two student interns that we had working at Luma for the past 2 weeks. They are Nathan Duker and Reahile Lekoape.
They came to learn about game development and to spend some time with our developers to get a feel for the industry and people.
As grade 10 students they had no previous exposure to programming and were ripe for our brainwashing.
We showed them some of the tools that we use and gave them a desk to sit at. The first week was spent learning Game Maker and watching tutorials.
The seconds week we provided them with a basic design and some tight deadlines. This is what they produced:
We are very proud of the work that they did here and hope they got a satisfying taste of our industry.
We wish them the best of luck with their studies and hope to see them at the community meetings.
Johan van Staden
Game Producer @ Luma Animation
I want to share our experience with two student interns that we had working at Luma for the past 2 weeks. They are Nathan Duker and Reahile Lekoape.
They came to learn about game development and to spend some time with our developers to get a feel for the industry and people.
As grade 10 students they had no previous exposure to programming and were ripe for our brainwashing.
We showed them some of the tools that we use and gave them a desk to sit at. The first week was spent learning Game Maker and watching tutorials.
The seconds week we provided them with a basic design and some tight deadlines. This is what they produced:
We are very proud of the work that they did here and hope they got a satisfying taste of our industry.
We wish them the best of luck with their studies and hope to see them at the community meetings.
Johan van Staden
Game Producer @ Luma Animation
Comments
How does it work??? How are you using it?
(I remember asking about this before XD)
Just add your game here?
http://www.indiedb.com/games/add
Does that create this dedicated forum that you're talking about for your game?
"Real game programming"? hahahahahaha.
I'm sure we can all agree that Luma allowing Grade 10 kids to job shadow is a good thing (even if we can't all agree on the details of how to prep them for their careers).
Personally I think those kids probably got a lot of awesome experience out of their very brief time at Luma. I think making a vertical scrolling space shooter is a great entry point into game programming.
Well done to Nathan and Reahile! I hope they enjoyed making their game and are inspired to keep learning, hopefully they'll even come post their next games here and take the opportunity to learn even more :) @SkinnyBoy: Okay, I can understand your frustration at the feeling that local kids get very little support when they want to learn programming. Heck, very few of them even have the opportunity to find out that it's something that they could do, let alone get the chance to find out if they enjoy it or not. That's a huge problem and something that I agree we need to do more about. However, I don't see how disparaging the efforts of two kids that grasped a really cool opportunity helps address that problem, nor do I see how implying that a successful local game studio knows nothing about teaching game development is a useful thing to do either. If anything, Luma should be commended for allowing Grade 10 kids the run of their offices, that's actually very difficult to do in a production environment.
MGSA has been trying to host workshops in schools, motivating for game programming as a great introduction to programming and lobbying both the Department of Education and the Department of Science and Technology for better curricula (especially during that whole Delphi debacle).
I'm not sure where your negativity comes from, or why it's so poorly aimed.
However that wasn't the point here. This was two grade 10 kids who just knew they wanted to "make games". They didn't really have any programming or gamedev background, and had no idea of what's involved in the process of making a game. These two weeks gave them a taste of the wide range of skills needed, and gave them some useful background to help them decide what part of the game development process appeals to them and would make sense to persue. I wish I'd had an opportunity like that at their age.
But other than that I'm super stoked about kids starting out much younger! I wish I had started at school! :(