Producing a Small Children's Summer Camp

Yesterday was the last day of the Mobile Game Dev camp, and I'm really glad I did it. Not only was it great to work with Chris Rawson and Sherly Yunita, but it was a really great experience over all. About halfway through the week we talked to Roger Altizer about some of our problems, and he gave us some great advice that I pondered over the remainder of the week.

While some of the students in the class were getting everything I dreamed of out of the course, many of the students were spending the majority of their time playing Minecraft and browser games. I figured that it wasn't really my responsibility to babysit the kids to get them to learn awesome things with their time--if they wanted to waste their parent's money, so be it. Roger set me straight, however--it is absolutely my responsibility to get them to learn awesome things. Some kids will inevitably goof off--he noted--but every kid comes home with a birdhouse, whether it be crappy or awesome.

After thinking about it, this really represents a lot of what I do as a producer, as well. I don't have to care what team members do with their time, but I should because it determines the success of the product. My success as a producer isn't about how well I organize the people who are already working fantastically, but about how well I motivate the rest of the team. Nobody praises a coach for the star player on the team, they praise the star player. The coach is praised when the entire team performs well, and getting the team to perform well is exactly what I should be doing as both a producer and a teacher.

I learned quite a few other things during the course of the camp, including a teacher's worth of knowledge about Game Maker and a lot about productivity and setting ground rules. I didn't think that I would learn as much as I did, but in reality, children are just very honest versions of adults. If they're bored, they're not going to listen. If they're interested in something, they'll pay attention to it. Managing children's productivity takes the same kind of skills that I enjoy working on that it takes to manage a large team, and I'm really happy I got the experience.