I'm Kieran Mathieson, your instructor for the course.
Please call me by my first name, if you're comfortable with that. It's pronounced like this.
I was born in Brisbane, Australia, in 1960. Yes, I'm very old. I learned to program computers in 1978, and have been doing it ever since. I came to the US in 1983, and finished my Ph.D. in information systems in 1987. I've been at Oakland University in Michigan since 1991. That's a long time.
I'm married, have two grown children, and two dogs. I loooove dogs. Send me photos of your dogs. If it's OK with you, I might put them on this site.
Your other cute animals, too. Chickens, goats, cats, whatever you got.
I like to play computer games to relax, things like Skyrim, Borderlands, and FarCry 5. I'm a proud nobody. I like Vegemite, and chocolate chip cookies.
I made this website to help you get the most from the time you invest in the course. Not only did I write the lessons here, but I also wrote the software I used to write the lessons.
As you might guess, I'm a geek. The tech in this course is fascinating to me. I hope you'll like it, too.
I mess with other tech as well. Right now, I'm learning Unity, a game development system. It's way cool, and very geeky.
I'm finding Unity challenging to learn. The programming is fine, but I don't know much about lighting, animation rigging, and other important stuff. I read something, don't understand it, get depressed, and play Borderlands for a while. But I always go back to it, and try again.
I've looped through that reading-not-getting-it-getting-depressed-try-again cycle many times over the 40+ years I've been working with computers. Sooo often I think, "I'll never get this." Sooo often I'm wrong.
When (not if) you get stuck, reach out to me, or other students. More on that later.