“It’s the final countdown. “ Europe. These four words now have a new, deeper meaning to me rather than just being a pretty decent song that I was planning to use at the start of the apocalypse. After spending the last three years in front of one of these computers, the idea of leaving it behind is a truly bittersweet experience. I am so excited for the opportunity I have to go off to school and do what I want, and yet, I can’t help but feel this sense of remorse over the fact that I will probably never see the walls of this classroom again.

TAG, the idea of a gaming experience in the classroom. To say that this year was a rough beta test may be a bit of an understatement, but I can also see the potential that this can offer. The process should be simplified, with an automatic way to increase XP and money, where students don’t have to constantly go back and forth to a spreadsheet to change everything. Also, I feel that things like group “quests” and raids should be implemented as a way to promote both teamwork and friendly competition among others.

AMP: being able to create freely. I feel that the idea of AMPday and having to earn full-time AMP is a stellar idea,and yes, I just said STELLAR. My problem with AMP was that when I “finished” a project that I was working on, I would feel a little lost and without direction. It was hard to decide if I wanted to continue in Photoshop, switch to Illustrator, or even try some coding. I think the plan to give a set of projects to do and work up to creative freedom is the right way to go in this class.

As to Skocko and his teachings, all I can really say is thank you. You helped me to understand my inner potential, follow my dreams, and to do what I love. More than just teaching me how to make lines in Illustrator, you helped me better understand myself and to appreciate good art. My time in the MacLab is something I’ll cherish, some of the greatest people I’ve ever known I have met in here, and I wouldn’t trade this time for the world.

Since AMP has started, I have dabbled in many different subjects of digital design. From Photoshop to Flash and even to coding a game of interactive online blackjack, I have been all over the place in ideas of what I wanted to do. What I have discovered is that, with my short attention span, I need to spread myself out among all of these programs, working on one until I feel that I need a change of pace. This is one such example. I have been coding for so long that it has become dull, and my need for change became overwhelming. So I decided to return to a picture I was fiddling with last year to see if it could be done better. It’s all about changing things up, so that everything can always feel exciting and new.

Over these last few months, I can safely say that, while I am nowhere near close to advanced, and am in fact just above the basics of understanding all of the programs available to us. I have spent my recent time between Flash, Photoshop, and Codeacademy projects, slowly learning my way through them all. What is funny is that I originally decided to check out coding so that I could fix the problem of the moving fish that I had been trying to solve in Flash for weeks, but now its become something I’m doing just for the fun of building my own programs, even if it’s only a game of rock, paper, scissors.

I finally found a topic to do a poster on. Inspiration came from my english class, where we had just finished watching The Devil Came on Horseback, a documentary about the genocide in Darfur, Sudan. For some reason, this movie struck a chord, and I feel like I should do something to raise public awareness. This is just a start, and I plan on improving it over the next few weeks. So until then, keep on trucking.

Only nine weeks in, and I can already tell that this year is going to be special. Who would have guessed that what had started off as this, would become something that I am quite proud of. I struggle every now and again, trying to pull something creative out of a brain that lives off of logic, and once in a while, something good does come out. These past weeks have really heightened my awareness of visual messaging and subtle changes that can be the difference between good art and great art.

This year, I want to start working in photography, with help from other Mac Labers. I then want improve my skills in Photoshop because I want to put most of my work through there and pull away from Illustrator.

Raids: Either one vs. one or group vs. group battles for a XP pool. Both groups put in a certain amount of XP, are given a challenge, and the first to complete it wins the “pot”.