The Life and Times of a Video Game Design Student

Since I know everyone is dying to know more about what kind of system HAL uses for academics, this post will be devoted to talking about the basics of my academic life as a first year student. It should be noted that while the general process is the same from year to year, the specifics such as classes and even class groupings can change year to year as the staff at HAL tweak it in order to help give students the best educational experience possible.

The basics

All the first year students have been split up into class groupings of about 30 to 40 people (with a couple exceptions). Unlike last year, in which all first years had the same group designation, we are grouped by the area we want to focus on: gaming, computer graphics, IT, music, etc. Some groups only have one class, but gaming is so large that it has four.

Like Japanese high schools, we spend a lot of our class time (well, right now, all of it) with this basic class grouping. About half the week, two classes study together. For example, I’m in A class for the game studies students and the class that we study with is B class. We are also assigned a seating number (decided by last name, although in my case it’s first name because I listed First Last instead of the traditional Japanese Last First), which is our assigned seat and an easy way for teachers to look us up in the computer without having to know our student numbers.

The first row of every class is reserved for any students repeating the class. Students are forced to repeat classes if their attendance falls below 80% or if they hand in less than 80% of assignments. Being late and handing in late assignments both affect the percentage, but I’m not entirely sure what the breakdown is (I swear my brain shuts off when stuff like that is being explained). If you fail too many classes, you have to repeat the entire year.

My teacher said that the first row is open because students repeating the class would not have a seating number for the class group they’re sitting in on (they would have one for their own class group), so they need to have a place to sit. While this is true, I secretly believe that it’s also set up like that in order to embarrass the student. Not only do they have the shame of failing the class, but that shame is also compounded by sitting in the front of the room and sticking out like a sore thumb. Everyone knows that you failed when you sit in the Seat of Shame (my name for it). I guess it’s good incentive to go to class and hand in your assignments, but I really hope I never see anyone sitting there.

Classes and scheduling

Class scheduling works much like university; we aren’t in school the same time every day, but rather our schedule is determined by what classes we have. This term our entire schedule is set, but next term we will be able to take some elective classes. There are approximately 21 class hours per week, which is about 6 hours of class per day. One period is an hour and a half, but many days we have two blocks of the same class in a row.

For an idea, here’s how my days break down (the gray area denotes classes):

All first year students in the 4 year program have the same basic schedule where we learn the following subjects:

• C programming
• Web design (HTML/CSS)
• Visual design
• A class devoted to brainstorming and thinking creatively
• Two classes devoted to studying for certification exams

In addition to those classes we have one 45 minute homeroom (or “flex time”, as the school calls it) period a week, which is very much like a high school study hall. After announcements and whatnot from the teacher, we’re free to work whichever of our assignments that we want. If I don’t have much due the next week, though, I’ll sometimes do other things like surf the web or work on blog posts.

Teaching methods

I know one area of the Japanese academic experience people are particularly interested in is the teaching methods. What’s different than a Western school? What’s the same? In some ways, school is school, whether it be a American high school, Canadian university, a Japanese language school or technical school. There are teachers both good and bad, varied teaching styles, workloads tailored to the institution and/or teacher, and all that good stuff.

In general, I would say that the teaching methods aren’t all that different from what I’ve experienced up to now in my academic life. The workload is heavier than what I had in university, but then again I had an easy ride once I learned how to manage my term papers. There are differences, but they are subtle and elusive. There’s nothing I can point to and say, “This is uniquely Japanese!” If I ever come across something obvious, though, rest assured that I will blog about it.

Teachers

As with any school, the quality of one’s experience is influenced heavily by the quality of one’s teachers. HAL aims for a teaching style that breaks down complicated and hard to understand subjects into smaller concepts that are easily understood. Some teachers achieve this goal better than others.

For the most part, my teachers write lots of stuff on the board, which is a lifesaver for me since my Japanese note taking skills are quite dismal. Not to mention that, since we move quickly through the material, having comprehensive notes to go back and look over is practically a necessity.

For our programming classes, the teacher writes the code on the board (for C it is usually in flowchart form) and then takes us through it step-by-step. For our other classes, they will write definitions, charts and graphs to help illustrate their points, etc. Classes are also very much practice-based, so we do a lot of writing of programs and doing problems from past exams.

I may have gotten a pretty good selection of teachers, but my friend, the other woman from America, wasn’t so lucky. For instance, one of her teachers believes that “good teaching” means never writing anything on the board and expecting students to do problems without any instruction on how to do them. The class that he teaches is one that I find particularly hard (and that’s with the thorough instruction from my teacher), so I can’t imagine what it would be like to have him. I’ve taken to lending her my notes in the hopes that it’ll help her fill in the huge gaps left by his crappy teaching methods.

Schoolwork and Homework

In contrast to what Lisa went through (the most charitable description being “boot camp”), we aren’t told to do the impossible in order to simulate a so-called “real life” work environment. Our homework, in-class assignments, and quizzes are all designed to augment the lectures and help us to understand the material that we’re covering. Which is great for me, since I am one of those people who learns best by trial and error.

In more concrete terms, we generally have two to three assignments due per week. At the very least we will always have a one page report (assigned and collected during homeroom), and there have been times when we’ve had up to four assignments due the same week. Even with our heaviest workload, though, not only are we given class time in which to work on them, but we also have plenty of out of class time in which to take care of anything we weren’t able to finish in class. The only times I’ve struggled have been when I procrastinated to the last minute, and even then it wasn’t like I was pulling all-nighters or anything.

I expect that things will get harder in the following years, if for no other reason than the material we’ll be learning will be more complicated, but as long as our workload is incremented slowly, I don’t think it’ll be a problem.

Final thoughts

So far I’m finding academic life to be pretty nice. Things get a little hectic once a month when we have quizzes, but even then the teacher tells us what subjects will be on the quiz, so we always know where to study from. In some ways it’s harder than university was — being responsible for assignments every week is, in my opinion anyway, much harder than having a bunch of term papers — but it’s easier than my Japanese language school was. I’m sure it helps that I have some experience with programming and databases and the like.

Though I’m not having problems, that doesn’t mean that studying in Japanese is easy. For one, it’s definitely harder to remember unfamiliar words than if I were learning them in English. In addition to that, I need to learn a whole different set of vocabulary to describe concepts that I already know in English (for example, when “memory” shows up as メモリ it’s not terribly hard, but it can also show up as 記憶装置, which took me a bit longer to remember). That I am doing as well as I am is a credit to the level of education I received at my Japanese language school, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it for anyone who doesn’t at least have the JLPT 2 (or equivalent) under their belt.

Still, all-in-all I’d say that my academic life is going well, and I’m looking forward to finding out what challenges await me in the next four years.