Hi. I'm Tim, Dr T Chamillard, and I'll be your instructor for this course. I'm an associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, where I teach a variety of game design and development courses, and I teach some computer science courses sometimes as well. I'm also the Program Director for our Bachelor of Innovation in game design and development. I have five and a half years of indie game development experience, and a company that I started with my two sons. Now I do my game development in my one man shop, Burning Teddy. Why Dr T? Well, I am a doctor even though I'm not the kind that helps people, so the doctor makes sense. I go by Tim, so the T makes sense as well. The reason for doctor T is a little more interesting than that. I mostly teach freshman and sophomores. At least here in the US, high school students are trained to call their teachers, Mr Jones or Ms Smith. The first time most of my students raises their hand in class and says, Mr T, everyone knows that's just wrong. As a visual reminder, I am Dr T, I'm not Mr T. This is a four-week course. For your graded work, there'll be three automatically graded programming assignments, which are worth a total of 75 percent of your grade. There will also be a final exam that's worth the remaining 25 percent of your grade. I've provided lots of exercises that aren't worth any points, but are valuable practice as you engage with the material in the course. I've also given you some practice quizzes as well. The four weeks are broken up as follows. In the first week, we have a getting started module which you are in right now as you get acclimated to the course. Then you'll write your first C Sharp code. In Week 2, you'll learn about, and use data types, variables, and constants. Then in the third week, you'll actually learn a critical idea about object-oriented programming, about classes and objects. Finally, in the last week, you'll learn some Unity 2D basics, and then we'll finish up the course. I wrote a book that we use in the first two C-Sharp programming in Unity courses at UCCS. I've given you a free copy of that book in a Week 1 reading. Thank you for taking this course. We'll use material from that book in all four courses in the specialization. In this course, I don't assume you have any previous programming experience. That's why beginning, is in the title. I do want to point out though, that beginning is not the same as easy. Beginning means you've never done it before and easy means it doesn't really require any effort to do. Think about riding a bike. The first time you rode a bike or tried to ride a bike, you were a beginning bike rider, but it probably wasn't easy for you to ride a bike. I want to make that distinction that even though I don't assume you've programmed before, this is not necessarily going to be easy. You're going to have to expend effort to actually learn the material in the course. Just so you know, the material in this course is based on approximately the first third of the first C-Sharp programming with Unity course, at UCCS. I also want you to know that you really need to do programming to actually learn it. Continuing talking about cycling, you can watch the Tour de France every year and you can read about cycling as much as you want, but that doesn't make you a professional cyclist. You actually have to do it and do it well, to become a cyclist. The same applies for programming. You can't just watch the videos. You can't just read the chapters in the book and suddenly you can program, you actually have to do it. You should also know that frustration is normal throughout your programming life, but especially as you're trying to learn how to do it. Don't be too upset if you struggle with some of the concepts and they take you some time to really grasp, because that's just a normal part of programming and it's a normal part of programming games as well. When you are frustrated and you need help, we have course forums for you to post on so that other learners in the course can help you. You can also go to the web or the Internet to try to get answers to your questions, though probably the course forums are a better choice. Of course you can go to the book as well. I've provided a course topic index. If you're struggling with a particular topic and you want to review where I covered it in lectures, you can go to the course topic index, which is in the resources for the course, and you can click on a link and it will take you directly to that place in that video where I'm talking about that particular topic. I hope you have a lot of fun in the course, and I hope you learn a lot as well. Let's go get to work.