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. The software is called Skilling. It's open source. Anyone can download it, and make their own courses. The software runs on top of Drupal, an open source content management system.
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.