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I am teaching a Geospatial Technologies course. My students are learning Dark Basic to reinforce mathematics, spatial thinking, visualize in 3D, and ultimately build their own 3D environment. They are currently going through the 3d Monster Hunt tutorials.

I am having a meeting with a guidance counselor, child study team member, a student and their parents, regarding the student's ability to read the tutorials. My concern is whether the tutorials are too difficult for students at the high school level. I do not think so. What do you all think?

THX

I would definitely say not - I went through them when I was about 13 or 14 and don't remember having any problems. I'll have a quick look through them again but I doubt they'd be too advanced.

EDIT: Looking back through - the information so far seems very understandable. However the bulk of text may be tricky. Some students may be averse to reading to that extent. Possibly you could talk through the commands in a basic form, building as you go and showing them the results, or have a slideshow with the basics on, yet also give them a link to the tutorial so that those who wanted could follow along to that. This way if they had difficulties with a section they could read up on it themselves from the tutorials, but it wouldn't rely entirely on getting a large number of children/teenagers to all read something independently. I think personally I'd prefer reading the tutorials, but depending on the age and concentration of your students you might want to apply a more visual approach.

The majority of this forum's members are around high school age and they have nothing but praise for the monster hunt tutorial.


Is this student the only one having problems?
You could make a simplified version of the tutorial with diagrams. Encourage them to use the original tutorial where they can though, in my limited experience I've found kids are quick to accept that they are dumb just because they don't grasp something as quickly as their friends. If you can write something that helps them get on track with the rest then problem solved.
The problem could be something simple that just needs explaining again.

The kid probably asked their parents to help, and since they couldn't, they think it's too hard.
Good luck with convincing them it's not.

@pdq
While I believe the Monster Hunt tutorial is very well written and explained complete with code examples and pictures, I do recall helping several users in the past trying to understand and/or expand on it.

While I think the problems that these users ran into had more to do with not really reading the tutorial and skipping through so they could get to creating the next great mega-game, they did have some of the same questions.

One of the most common questions was regarding the collision. The collision methods in the Monster Hunt game are designed specifically for Monster Hunt. Many users have tried to just grab the collision code out of there and found it doesn't work without modification. The same with the bullet code. While the ideas behind these methods can be broadly applicable, a student should be made aware that the Monster Hunt tutorial shows techniques, and not cookie cutter blocks of "how tos."

Perhaps having the student explain to you what they are reading or what they think they are learning or actually coding in the tutorial will give you an idea of how the information is being absorbed.

Again, I don't think the tutorial is too difficult for high school students, but I think it's important to look at the "why and what" aspsects of what the author was doing. Why didn't the author just use the built in collision commands from DBC? What does math have to do with Monster Hunt? How could one add or reduce the number of pillars and how would the custom collision code have to be modified? Are there any other ways any of the code could be rewritten?

@Latch

Yeah, the students type the code, but they don't read about what the code is doing.

I am showing additional examples of code to the students, recapping what they should have read themselves.

They are having fun experimenting

pdq "whether the tutorials are too difficult "
I'm afraid youv'e picked the wrong people to ask that question.
It's like asking a driver how hard can it be to drive?
Not only are the people you are asking already programming but their perspective is on programming and not teaching.
As a qualified trainer, assessor and internal verifier for National Awards I can give you a quick answer.
The monster hunt is far too advanced for anyone as an introduction to programming.
That is exactly why Lee Bamber provides hundreds of small examples to get you started. Everything from how to create a matrix, moving an object on a matrix and getting a camera to follow that object etc.
To bypass this basic foundation and leap straight into a full blooded program introduces far too steep a learning curve.
The result of this will be widespread copying of other peoples work by at least 75% of the student body.
I witnessed this at first hand when I myself was a student.
The educational emphasis these days is not so much on learning knowledge but rather learning how to pass an exam.
Even the moral implication of cheating can be subverted by a moral right to have the same fighting chance as others in the class that nature might have gifted more than yourself.
You could end up with a whole group of people who's only ability is to type, cut and paste.
As to whether the monster tutorial is a bridge too far, test the students. Ask each one to step through the code and tell you exactly what's happening. If they can't do this then it will prove beyond a doubt that the tutorial is too advanced.
Doing this now means that you can revert to the small examples I mentioned to give the students a programming foundation.
The 'monster hunt' tutorial is after all just a combination of all the small examples brought together.
The test difference however is that if each student has to learn all the small examples and then bring them together each program will look slightly different as it should.
Better to have a simpler program that each student can complete by themself than a more complicated one completed by a handful of students and copied by the rest!