Welcome everyone to the new and improved Programming for Designers 2010.

I (Malcolm Ryan) am taking back the reins this year and making some big changes to the subject. Student feedback from last year was that the Alice programming environment was too simplistic and not useful in the ‘real world’, so this year we are switching to C# programmming using the Unity 3D game engine. This engine offers the exciting possibility of writing programs that you can publish on the Web, or for other platforms. What’s more, Unity is free, so you can download your own copy to work at home.

The downside is that there is no “Programming with Unity” textbook and I will be rewriting a lot of last year’s lecture and lab materials as we go. So you may have to be patient with some bumps along the way. On the plus side, the online documentation for Unity is very good and the support forums are usually very helpful.