I'm (substitute) teaching game programming at a school (teen to adult, C# with #Unity) rn and have noticed the students struggle doing even quite simple assignments, like adding a public field and using replacing a literal with that field. Any tips on good ways to train the very basics?
In addition to my teaching, they've been following Unity tutos and CodeAcademy C# lessons.
@arzi Sounds like a similar age and experience to my class. I usually start with really basic stuff outside of a game engine, in a c# console app. Really basic stuff... like hello world ...then edit the literal string ...then replace it with a variable ...then we take some input and store it in a string ...then we join 2 strings and echo them back. Then eventually after a few weeks, they might be able to do a basic number guessing game in the console. And then we look at a game engine.
@arzi And actually the "engine" we look at is MonoGame, which is not so different from the ramp up.
So maybe this advice is useless, if you don't have the time or options.
That said, it might be worth spending a week on the basics, removed from the cognitive load of a game framework.
@arzi Totally get that. Just to be clear, my advice wasn't "abandon Unity", it was "spend a little time on C# fundamentals". But I know how tricky it can be working around someone else's plans and restrictions. :)
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