Olafur Waage, Senior Programmer at Massive Entertainment, is used to teaching others about programming. Today, we’re happy to share his lecture “C++, Game Development and Me” that he did at the University of Reykjavik earlier this year.
For example, he’s the teacher on NGON’s video project Code{}School, that we’ve written about on the blog before. But he also does talks outside of Massive and Ubisoft, including this talk for Game Engine Design students at his old school, the University of Reykjavik. The talk covered both programming tips and a look at how Ubisoft Connect works.
“Outside of the regular topics like who I am and what I do on a day to day basis, I also wanted to go over topics the students most likely had covered but to cover them from a different angle,” Olafur tells us. “In this talk I discuss design patterns and why studying them in the classical manner might not be very effective, and then I go over a problem in performance and code efficiency they might not have thought about.”
When teaching, Olafur’s aim is to create “Aha!” moments. Instead of focusing on specific features, he wants to focus on problems that might arise and how to solve them using the tools the students have already learned. “Then we can reveal the feature or element we are teaching”, he says. “Now the students have a connection to why a certain feature exists. When you teach someone something, starting with the ‘why’ is important.”
If you want to learn more from Olafur, make sure to follow him on Twitter. As a bonus, you will also get a lot of programming jokes from him.