First Week of School

With great anticipation I arrived 5 minutes early for first day of class. First surprise? most people arrived late. Seats quickly ran out as the room was small. Second surprise: lack of laptops. I realized I had the professional meetup/seminar mindset when everyone is typing away, taking notes, back channeling or something else. The professor handed out a color printed copy of the course schedule printed from moodle. There were only four laptops I can see amongst 30+ people.

As with must classes, first 30 minutes is spent on housekeeping. Then we broke into small groups to do some brainstorming work. Instinctively I took over as facilitator for the group. Then I realized, on average, the students are a lot less aggressive and participatory then, say even the typical MBA case based classroom. I also forgot that this is a joined class, with a mix of undergrads and grad students. For some of them this maybe their second semester of school. One clear thing is that everyone is pretty bright. Since the course is in Game design for education, we talk a lot about games of all types. And clearly they know games and I learned a thing or two from them in that domain.

Second class – as the class is overbooked, the professor filtered the class down to 20 by second class. It is now more manageable space wise. Still better than meeting in a basement classroom. Now the class is going, it hits me. There are a lot of reading to be done per class. Not to mentioned because this class is very much project based, I see scheduling time with my group a challenge. Until then, it is still a fun, fun class!