StarCraft course at Berkeley gains unexpected attention

Remember our article last week about a StarCraft course at the prestigious UC Berkeley?  Well, an avid little StarCraft fansite that also picked up the news was able to do a follow up piece, contacting the young man who is teaching the class now.

As it turns out, countless online game sites, news and blogs alike, were talking about Alan Feng's course.  The now famed StarCraft course is actually a "DeCal" class, meaning it is run by students and not a professor.  Instead, Feng needed to propose the idea and get it approved by a professor, which can be tougher than most think even on a campus with other DeCal courses about StarTrek and Firefly.  Feng explained, "I found a professor to show to him the importance of our topic, and also to prove that the class has rigorousness, i.e., enough to teach over the course of 13 weeks."

Feng was also surprised by the popularity of the course.  Not only did websites report on his bold move, but mainstream news media like NBC picked up the story as well following his course's debut. 

Overall, the response was nothing short of phenomenal, and the course thread received 1000 hits and 50 replies within 24 hours of posting.  Remarkably, Feng hasn't gotten many negative reactions from all this exposure, aside from his parents warning him not to drop out of college again.  They may be referring to his somewhat shifty track record, as Feng dropped out of college in the past but returned after realizing he couldn't make enough money with professional gaming.

Alan Feng had recently trained with a professional orator and teacher from China, and he hopes to have picked up a few skills that will help him teach this class.  He's terribly excited and hopes to inspire a more analytical way of looking at StarCraft by exploring "many pure theory aspects" that remain universal for all RTS games.

The class has no upper limit of students, but Feng had been worried about the class turnout.  "The largest classroom on campus is 480 people but I doubt they'll let me have the auditorium" he said, later predicting a class count of 40 students.

Berkeley may need to give him a larger room though, because the lecture hall proved too small for the 150 or so attendees.  Feng believes that without the "infinite bloggers around the world, [he] would have been one lonely guy in the middle of a big lecture hall."