Teaching Game Design - Dev Update 9/5/19

Unfortunately I haven't been able to work on the game for a while now, and I will have less time to work on it because I started teaching game design!
Every day I go back and forth between a high and elementary school to teach coding within the context of game design.

For the high schoolers it's a little easier because, well, they're high schoolers.  For them I'm teaching GDevelop (a great no-code 2D game engine) and Coppercube (a great, no-code 3D game engine), with Piskel and Tinkercad for asset creation.  The point of that class is to explore game development as an art form, with less focus on the code aspect. 

To the middle schoolers, I'm teaching Tinkercad for 3D modeling (that can also be applied to 3D printing), and then importing those models into CoSpaces. 
CoSpaces is surprisingly underused in education, and it's essentially a step up from Scratch.  It uses block-based code, but in a 3D environment that, when paired with a smartphone, can be viewed in VR and AR--my two favorite bits of tech.

What's great about coSpaces is that for those students with a little bit of Javascript knowledge, there is a really powerful API that they can use. 
At the high school, each student has their own laptop--All Macs, incidentally.
At the middle school, however, the students have chromebooks.  This forced me to only use Web-Based software (which CoSpaces and Tinkercad are). 
The only problem is that...
1) The wheel-in large monitor isn't available yet, so it's hard for the students to see what I'm explaining.
2) Oh, yeah, they don't even have the chromebooks yet...
So for this week, it's impossible for me to teach anything without computers!  I gave a 15 min introduction to what they will be learning, but aside from that, there isn't much else I can do.

Luckily today is my last day of the week (they don't have code on Fridays), and they should be getting the computers Monday.
On Fridays, however, there are electives they can choose from.  This is super cool, except for my coding elective, they are most likely doing the same things they are doing during the rest of the week.  So, I'm trying to replace the coding elective with magic instead.  It's an extremely unique part of any school (no other school has it), and it teaches kids to perform/speak in front of crowds and build confidence in them.  Hopefully that will work out...

Thanks for reading!
- Judah