Joe1972

Have you tried vitamin D?

You spend a lot of money towards advancing education. What impact do you think the advent of MOOCs will have on the role of teachers in years to come? Will we all just end up working through MOOCs with our classes and act as glorified assessment centers? Can you see MOOCs meaningfully contribute towards uplifting Africa? What in your opinion would be the biggest challenges to make these work for the African continent?

Hi Molehole.

I've been lecturing IT (including software dev and game dev) for about 15 years now and have some very successful students in the industry.

There are some amazing resources out there today. I'd suggest starting with something simple that can run on many platforms. For example HTML5 game programming. There is a great FREE course you can do here. This will get your confidence up and get you producing something while you learn the more serious skills. In my experience its good to keep your enthusiasm going on smaller and easy to learn projects whilst developing the skills you'll need long term.

If you want to be a programmer, you need to learn serious programming skills. Specifically a good general Object Orientated programming background in a language like C, C++, C#, Java, etc.

If you just want to produce games I would suggest learning Unity or something similar.

Personally I'm a huge fan of XNA (which can be used for free with the express versions of visual studio) and with some of the starter kits that's available free of charge on the web for XNA you can produce really cool playable games in very little time.

Hope this helps a bit? If you want more I could probably at some time do an AMA ;) Don't wanna "hijack" this thread

Good to hear :)

Also browse through the rest of the courses on offer at udacity. They really are world class. If those doesn't meet all your needs you can also look at the open courses offered by Stanford and MIT, some great programming courses on their sites for free. iTunes U also carries good material for free.

In my experience some of the best "teach yourself" material in the world can be found in the "headfirst" series of textbooks. I'm even using one of them "Headfirst Design patterns" as a textbook for a 4th year programming course I'm offering. There is a headfirst book for both c# and for java. The best allround Java and/or C textbooks for beginners in my opinion are the ones by Deitel & Deitel.

Thanks ;) I'll have to make another plan then