Brennan / All, I did not mean to imply that your tutorials were in any way misleading. When I said "go until you get lost." I meant work through them until you hit overload. First-time programmers / learners need to solidify new bits of knowledge / concepts before building on them. -at least i did- I took a crack at Invadirs before I knew any lingo. Had just started working through Dir. 8 Demystified. Soon I was lost but my little alien ships were moving. A few months and many little projects later I came back to the Invadirs tutorial. I was happy to find that the code that stumped me before seemed intelligible. I made it through a few more chapters before brain lock set in. Your explanations are NOT to blame for my confusion, I just needed time to apply and solidify what I had grasped before moving on to concepts that rely on an understanding of that new information. This time I posted the result: http://edu.audiotap.com/mylife/movies/student_invaders.htm Still no where near polished nor with the functionality of the later Invadirs chapters but a good way for me to feel good about how far I had come and give myself a benchmark for my next attempt (about 3 weeks from now). Let me thank you again for the tutorial Brennan. Online instructional materials are not easy to put together in such a cohesive manner such as you have. Best wishes, Justin Olmanson "Justin Olmanson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote >Go through Brennan Young's "Invadirs" game tutorial. Stop when you get lost >and finish the project as best you can. Revisit the tutorial very two to >three months making a new game each time (noting your progress). > >http://brennan.young.net/Edu/Lingvad.html "Brennan Young" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote Wow, that's interesting advice! I'm always interested in suggestions and comments about the Invadirs tutorial, even if I have no time to act on them. I appreciate your suggestion to 'finish as best you can'. That's exactly the attitude I was trying to cultivate. It was the 'revisit every two to three months' that surprises me. Are you saying you've been using it as some kind of reference? ...but yes, people do seem to get lost somewhere around lesson 17. (There's a screenshot which conflicts with the text in that lesson, or thereabouts. Depending which one people take most seriously, they may or may not hit a bug which requires thinking outside the box. For some people that's not even conceivable. :) I've had an update in the works for over a year which ought to make the last lessons a bit less heavy-going, but there's only so many hours in the day, and writing a smoothly pedagogical bug free tutorial involves a kind of meta-level debugging that is not to be undertaken lightly. I am torn between making the tutorial become a complete game or keeping it as primarily as a learning tool. You certainly learn a lot by finishing stuff off, even if (or especially if) it's not as good as you know you can make it. Maybe that's the most valuable lesson of all. One thing I've seen with feedback on my tutorial is people who follow the code too slavishly, without experimentation, and don't use the effort to understand the main body of the text instead. I guess there's no way around that. Almost all feedback has been positive though, and I'm confident that it has set a fair number of folks on the path of light. Thanks for mentioning it! _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp. [To remove yourself from this list, or to change to digest mode, go to http://www.penworks.com/lingo-l.cgi To post messages to the list, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Problems, email [EMAIL PROTECTED]). Lingo-L is for learning and helping with programming Lingo. Thanks!]
