Courses, MOOCs and online lectures
C# for Unity Game Development
Video tutorial series on Lynda.com
Ready to start developing your first game, but need to get up to speed on C#? Learn the basics of programming in C# for Unity and find out how to script your first game development project. Jesse Freeman covers the structure, syntax, and language of C# as it works inside the Unity IDE. The lessons focus on the most important concepts for beginners to master, including variables, methods, data structures, flow control, classes, inheritance, interfaces, and composition. The goal of the course is to teach developers the basics of how to use C# in Unity as well as some higher-level scripting strategies.
Topics include:
Scripting in Unity
C# variables and functions
Lists and arrays
Conditions and loops
C# classes
Design Principles: an Introduction
Coursera MOOC taught by Scott Klemmer, Associate Professor, University of California, San Diego
What makes an interface intuitive? How can I tell whether one design works better than another? This course will teach you fundamental principles of design and how to effectively evaluate your work with users. You'll learn fundamental principles of visual design so that you can effectively organize and present information with your interfaces. You'll learn principles of perception and cognition that inform effective interaction design. And you'll learn how to perform and analyze controlled experiments online. In many cases, we'll use Web design as the anchoring domain. A lot of the examples will come from the Web, and we'll talk just a bit about Web technologies in particular. When we do so, it will be to support the main goal of this course, which is helping you build human-centered design skills, so that you have the principles and methods to create excellent interfaces with any technology.
Human-Centered Design : an Introduction
Coursera MOOC taught by Scott Klemmer, Associate Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science & Engineering at University of California, San Diego (where he is a co-founder and co-director of the Design Lab).
Learn how to design technologies that bring people joy, rather than frustration. You'll learn several techniques for rapidly prototyping and evaluating multiple interface alternatives -- and why rapid prototyping and comparative evaluation are essential to excellent interaction design. You'll learn how to conduct fieldwork with people to help you get design ideas. How to make paper prototypes and low-fidelity mock-ups that are interactive -- and how to use these designs to get feedback from other stakeholders like your teammates, clients, and users. Armed with these design-thinking strategies, you’ll be able to do more creative human-centered design in any domain.
Information Design
Coursera MOOC taught by Scott Klemmer, Associate Professor, University of California, San Diego
A blank canvas is full of possibility. If you have an idea for a user experience, how do you turn it into a beautiful and effective user interface? This covers covers principles of visual design so that you can effectively organize and present information with your interfaces. You'll learn concrete strategies to create user interfaces, including key lessons in typography, information architecture, layout, color, and more. You’ll learn particular issues that arise in new device contexts, such as mobile and responsive interfaces. You will learn how to apply these design principles in a modern context of increasingly diverse form factors - from tablets, to walls, to watches.
User Experience: Research & Prototyping
Coursera MOOC taught by Elizabeth Gerber, Segal Design Institute, and Scott Klemmer, UC San Diego
What makes for a great user experience? How can you consistently design experiences that work well, are easy to use and people want to use? This course will teach you the core process of experience design and how to effectively evaluate your work with the people for whom you are designing. You'll learn fundamental methods of design research that will enable you to effectively understand people, the sequences of their actions, and the context in which they work. Through the assignments, you’ll learn practical techniques for making sense of what you see and transform your observations into meaningful actionable insights and unique opportunity areas for design. You’ll also explore how to generate ideas in response to the opportunities identified and learn methods for making your ideas tangible. By answering specific questions and refining your concepts, you’ll move closer to making your ideas real. We’ll use cases from a variety of industries including health, education, transportation, finance, and beyond to illustrate how these methods work across different domains.
