(Irish Conference on Game Based Learning)
Cork City
This conference genre was relatively new to me. I have only been teaching Games Development for two years, so It was a great experience to get further insights into this field. The venue was perfect overlooking the river and very central to cork city. The conference began with a keynote from David Murphy from University College Cork, based on VR, a very hot topic at the moment.
One trending topic which was comforting to me was the use of Unity3D (as it is my current engine of choice coupled with Visual Studio and C#). Unity3D also seemed to be a major player in VR development. I also liked that coding was as prominent as design. I was getting accustomed to people saying that you don't need code to develop a 3D game. Where Unity does foster this with its excellent UI and drag and drop features, an emerging theme in the conference was that coding is now a big player in customized game development, as the drag and drop can only take you so far.
I was primarily at this conference to deliver a presentation on the use of Scratch as an Intervention in
CS1 to increase performance and programming self-efficacy. There was also a first for me, I was a chair for a presentation strand. It seemed to go very well and I even had interest of, possibly using this Intervention in a college in the US where they were already considering this approach. This was such a positive response, and reassuring that it may be of value to the CSEd community.