Open Days are here again. This is some of the audience who sat through my talk this afternoon. Hope you all had a good time and thanks for braving the elements to come and see what we do at Hull. We are holding more Open days in the next few weeks.

This is Warren handing out a copy of a great book (Oh Yes) to the winner of the prize draw at the end. Those that came along also took home a printed copy of the C# Yellow Book. If you want to find out more about that, and perhaps download other coloured books, you can find them at www.csharpcourse.com

Rob Miles

These are some of the games and applications that students and staff at Hull have made over the last few months. Some of them are implementations of games produced at Three Thing Game and Evil Squash.

There are now Evil Squash games in Windows Phone Marketplace. For those that haven’t heard of the game of Evil Squash; it is a kind of cross between Snakes and Ladders and Ludo. We invented it just for our first year programming practical work. And now some enterprising students have got versions running in the Windows Phone marketplace.

We had our Christmas Bash today. A bit near the end of the semester so it was a fairly select gathering, but fun none the less.  We did the usual Team Fortress 2 and Pizza

After 3 hours of solid effort Simon found all of the 78 words in the “Three Thing Game” Christmas Wordsearch. We had to give him a prize, but only after we’d checked the age rating of it.

Double barrelled cracker action. There are some more pictures on Flickr.You can find them here.

The Software Development for the semester 1 First Year C# Programming course this year is a game we have invented. We’ve called it Evil Squash. It even has its own web site at www.evilsquash.com

The game is very like Snakes and Ladders, but with a twist that makes it a bit like Ludo as well. At the end of this semester each of the First Year students will demonstrate their implementation of the game as part of the practical assessment. We have found that game creation is a very good way to explore programming and learning how to create solutions to problems.

Next semester the First Years will choose between an arcade game and a line of business application for their practical work.

These are the students, with their “things”.

Every semester we do a “Three Thing Game” development. Student teams are given a week to create a game based on three “Things” chosen at random. On Monday we give out the things, as you can see above. We then do some special sessions about game development during the week, and the teams prepare their assets ready for the big development push over the weekend. On Saturday morning the teams set up their work areas in the department and then there is a 24 hour pizza powered development frenzy to get a game working before the judging on Sunday morning.

This time we had the biggest ever competition, with 25 teams turning up. This meant around a fifth of our student population was in the department working on games for 24 hours. Everywhere you looked there were teams frantically preparing assets and honing gameplay. This year we also had a record number of First Year students taking part, some of whom had only started learning C# in September. And they all got something working.

On Sunday we had the judging. Each team starred in a video of their game and the judges had a tricky job, as the standard was really, really high. Some of the creations were pretty much ready for sale. If you want to find out all about the teams, who won and find links to the judging videos you can go to www.threethinggame.com for more.

The next Three Thing Game is on the weekend of the 17th and 18th of March. Some of the students are already preparing…

Hot on the heels of the Undergraduate Party last week we had the Postgraduate one. Same routine, even some of the same quiz questions. These were the lucky (and skilful) winners.

Today was the day of the UG Welcome Party. We take over a bar in Staff House, set up some video games, eat some free food, hand out some beer tokens and then have some fun. And a quiz. This year was no exception.

This is the winning team. You’d think they’d look happier.

Recently Rob Miles of the department teamed up with Windows Phone developer Andy Wigley to spend two days taking about Windows Phone development, with the focus on the latest version of the platform, codenamed Windows Phone Mango. The sessions were broadcast over the internet to over a thousand live attendees and have just been released as videos. You can find them here. Andy and Rob did a similar set of videos last year which have notched up over 500,000 views.

We had our last bash of the year today. It was great fun, even though we had some technical troubles. The camera on the PlayStation Move was definitely faulty, causing me to lose at Table Tennis. Fortunately the Pizza arrived on time, and everybody had fun. Some were there with tears in their eyes, with this being their last bash as students in the department.

There are a few more pictures on Flicker tagged Hull2011SummerBash.