Journals

Journal 1 - First Steps

This week has been an interesting first step into the world of work, in some ways because of just how similar some tasks are to what I do anyway. Since the beginning of the externship with Unity I have given three presentations on three different campuses both about the work we do in my classroom and the ways that Unity, the game engine we use in class, makes that work possible. As a Unity Education Ambassador that is a lot of what I was already doing, but the best part about the first week of the externship was having the opportunity to give one of those presentations with a co-presenter from Unity. Thomas Winkley, Technical Marketing Advocate – Social Impact and Education, and I presented to a group of educators from Utah and led them through a hands on training about how to use Unity in the classroom; the training included an overview of the engine, steps to animate, basic coding overviews, and resources for further study. My job in the training was to walk around and help teachers as they followed the steps, and I was pleasantly surprised that I had valuable suggestions to share with them based on my application and learning in my own classroom over the years. The most interesting conversations I had with our attendees was the boots on the ground suggestions for implementing Unity with kids in educational contexts.

Many parts of this first week of the externship were a lot like the typical trainings that I do for teachers. What was different was seeing the organization behind the scenes of the company, co-planning some of the elements of the presentation with a team, and then having another presenter to lean on during the session.

Journal 2 - Scope and Sequence

This week my big task was to look at a scope and sequence document for potential certification alignments/expansion. Again, in this particular work many of the elements of the task followed a lot of what I already do in the classroom. While the content was more technical in some ways, the document was interesting to consider from the perspective of a teacher in the classroom. Some elements would be easy to include in a classroom while others were pretty significant lifts for a teacher to implement because of time. It was clear that my experience in the classroom could inform some of the breakdown of skills and some of the opportunities for design and delivery of content training. For a few of the elements I had to go back into the engine in order to compare how some of the functions have changed in different software updates, and for others I had to go back in to explore subcomponents of functions in order to compare and contrast the functionality in order to suggest additions and modifications to the content. I also compared these elements with current training that is available so that I could make suggestions on training to be created. These comparisons gave me a window into how to modify my curriculum for future certification opportunities.

This is the same kind of work that teachers do every day with standards, benchmarks, and objectives. While the specificity of the skills was greater in this document and much more targeted, the general concept was much the same. I am looking forward to the next round of this work where the alignment of skills turns into actionable training materials.

Journal 3 - Understudy

While the Unity team was down at the annual International Society for Technology in Education conference in Louisiana this past week, I was honored to be asked to stand in for the crew and present as part of a panel for a Penn State conference on the future of the metaverse. Since I would be speaking on behalf of the company, I thought it was important to get official answers to the panel questions, and in between the Unity team's travel from England to the Big Easy we collaborated through Google Docs to find the sweet spot with the answers that needed to be locked in and those that I had creative freedom to answer how I might want.

Then, two work days before the event, all of the other panelists unfortunately cancelled, and I was asked if I could put together a presentation that was part Unity and part practitioner's perspective. I also was asked to limit the presentation time to 15 minutes. In order to practice the presentation but also ensure that I covered the content and hit the time limit, I recorded the presentation, which can been seen to the left.

Journal 4 - to Flex (verb)

Flex is an interesting word. It has multiple definitions that seem to span a spectrum. On the one side, to flex means to bend...as in to minimize your rigidity in order to make things move more easily. On the other side, to flex means to boast or to stand tall...especially when you are using your power or influence to change a conversation or stand your ground. This week, Flexing has been the name of the game, on both sides.

I was invited/assigned to a new team for this week's work. I was added as a quality assurance checker for a set of tutorials that had already been made. I was also asked to do some technical writing, and in order to align my writing style with established norms, was asked to study previously published tutorials. The thing was, when I updated my software to get the projects to work the update failed and I spent the better part of multiple days dealing with a known issue related to the software. Eventually, after almost five hours off and on with tech support, we found a workaround solution, but that has had unintended consequences and resulted in some additional work needing to be done. The combination of needing to adapt to a changing work environment required flexing in all kinds of ways as new tasks, teams, communication tools, access issues, etc. modified the working environment.

On the other hand, I was asked to come in and look at the work being done with new eyes and to push on the project outline with my expertise as a practitioner. In essence to be a "Bull in a China Shop!" and to give honest feedback based on past performance. In essence, I was asked to flex on the projects to make sure that just because something could or was being done that it was the right thing.

It's been an interesting juggling act - finding that sweet spot between being flexible and standing my ground, especially in a workflow that I only have partial access to.

On one of the projects I also made a set of assets that may or may not be used in the final product. One of the members of the workgroup asked for some animated particles in the shape of a Z, so in one of the down times while I was waiting for some of the tech help I went ahead and made a couple of versions of the requested feature. In one, I took a character, turned it into a 3D shape, and then animated the 3D models. This process took creating the character in Photoshop, exporting it as a .svg file that could be extruded, importing that file into a 3D modeling program, extruding the shape, UV unwrapping the shape, exporting as a .fbx file, importing into the game editor, applying a material, animating the shape, and then exporting the complete package. In the other implementation I took the 2D file, adjusted the colors for use in the 3D game engine, modified the applied shader to incorporate transparency, created a particle system, customized that particle system with the image texture, adjusted the particle variables, and then exported the complete package. Then I made a video to update the team.

Journal 5 - Build Once, Use ?????

One of the biggest challenges I have found over the years in terms of content creation, especially in technology is the difficulty of keeping content accurately updated. Years ago when I moved towards making my own content to teach kids about XR content creation, it was amazing how quickly content would be outdated and modularity of content would be SUPER helpful in personalizing instruction. Unfortunately, without a content creation and management system this has been all but impossible. What I found interesting is that this is also a serious cause for concern with professional environments as well. Enter a conversation I started to have with some of the people at Unity this week. It seems like reusability and easier content creation is something that could be beneficial to them as well as to me.

While I don't know if anything will come of the conversation, I brought up a local Colorado company that does work in this space, Xyleme, and have reached out to them to get a feeling for pricing structures and delivery models. Their Build Once Publish Everywhere philosophy is something that could make content creation at my level and at Unity's level a more manageable process. Seeing a major company having some of the same headaches with version control, delivery methodology, and collaborative authoring as I have experienced was reassuring on the one hand and disheartening on the other; I guess that I had hoped that the struggle of adaptable content creation was something I could learn through the externship but it is somewhat comforting to know that it isn't just my own issue.

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