Bad games can either make you throw your controller at the screen or inspire you to design better ones. If you think you can do better or are just interested in making games, a game design course like that offered by School of Game Design is one way to go to acquire the necessary skills. Game design isn’t producing a polished product, but sketching out the rules and strategies of games at the pre-production stage.
If you are into comic books, it can seem that their creators are so far beyond the rest of us in skill and imagination that only they have the divine right to produce comic books. The fantastic epics that roll off the presses and into comic book stores seem to be born in another realm to which mere mortals have no access. Yet if you stop to think about it, those people had to start somewhere and were once shaky novices producing forgettable work.
Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, studied philosophy at college. Astute viewers will have noted the many references to philosophy in the show – Homer, for one, is so named as a nod to a great thinker (but he thinks it comes from baseball). Critics have noted for a long time that the show does more than merely play with philosophy. Rather than mentioning clever stuff in passing to show its creator’s erudition, the Simpsons actually does philosophy.
Have you ever wanted to solve a crime? It seems to be a common fantasy – stepping into the shoes of a flinty-eyed detective, assessing the evidence and leaving no stone unturned to tighten the net around the criminal until he is forced to confess. These days a lot of that work is done via forensic science. There are quite a lot of games on the Google Play and Apple Stores based on forensic TV shows like CSI and NCIS in which you analyse the evidence to deduce who committed the crime.
If you have ever taken an eLearning course, do you remember the essentials of it now? Did it get the knowledge into your head in an engaging way that helped you to retain it? If the answer is yes, you were lucky enough to have taken a course created by a good instructional designer. Instructional Design is the practice of creating learning experiences which make the acquisition of knowledge efficient, effective and appealing.
Why exactly did the apocryphal apple fall on Isaac Newton’s head? That’s what Newton wondered, and set out to discover why. Many of us wonder in the same way about why things happen, but don’t have time to dedicate our lives to getting to the bottom of it. Most of us don’t have a nuclear reactor or particle accelerator in our garden shed. Here’s a course for armchair physicists around the world who want to be told how it all works by people who have done all the hard thinking.
With the UK having voted to leave the European Union and right-wing leaders in Europe and around the world celebrating the decision (when this was written), it might be a good time for future leaders, administrators and businesspeople to deepen their knowledge of International Relations. In an atmosphere of growing nationalism, diplomacy and knowledge of world affairs are skills that might be in higher demand.
How can we be free in a world of jobs, debt and alarm clocks? What’s the best way to live life from moment to moment? If we don’t decide this ourselves, the pressures of life are sure to fill up those moments for us and we risk being left without a sense of peace, purpose or pleasure.
‘The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.’
Have you ever wanted to solve a crime? It seems to be a common fantasy – stepping into the shoes of a flinty-eyed detective, assessing the evidence and leaving no stone unturned to tighten the net around the criminal until he is forced to confess. These days a lot of that work is done via forensic science. There are quite a lot of games on the Google Play and Apple Stores based on forensic TV shows like CSI and NCIS in which you analyse the evidence to deduce who committed the crime.
