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Popular Gaming Program Making UC Santa Cruz One of the Elite
An innovative program at UC Santa Cruz is luring students and professors from all over the country and overseas, and it has nothing to do with the campus’ proximity to the beach.
Four years ago, the Baskin School of Engineering’s computer science department began offering degrees in game design. Now the program boasts more than 400 undergraduate students and 18 doctoral and master’s students.
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A New School Teaches Students through Videogames
An 11-year-old boy taps furiously on a laptop, blasting enemies as he weaves through a maze. They wipe him out before he can reach the end — game over. Frustrated, he opens the game’s programming window, adjusts the gravity setting, and this time bounds over the baddies. Victory!
This could be the future of American education, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The Quest to Learn school opened last September in Manhattan, welcoming the first class of sixth-graders who will learn almost entirely through videogame-inspired activities, an educational strategy geared to keep kids engaged and prepare them for high-tech careers.
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How Dundee Became a World Gaming Hub
The UK government is investing £2.5m in a video games centre at Abertay University, Dundee. There are more than a dozen gaming companies based in the city. How did it become such a hub for the industry?
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UC Irvine Offering Four-Year Video Games Program
Construction is currently underway on a 4,000 square-foot, 20-room “cyber interaction observatory” for faculty research, and the plans call for floor-to-ceiling projection screens, and advanced 3D displays. The university states that the center’s goal is to expand campuswide research activities that draw upon UCI’s strengths spanning the social and technological aspects of games and virtual worlds. More than 20 faculty members from computer science, arts, humanities, social science, and education will collaborate in the center tackling topics as diverse as brain-computer interfaces, human-computer interaction, intellectual property in virtual worlds, and games for teaching constructive social values. Students will also be able to learn about the anthropology of virtual worlds, games as literature, and even game criticism. The film and media studies department also carves out machinima as a separate area for exploration.
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Online Game to Improve Child Road Safety
The Department for Transport has taken an unusual approach to improving child road safety by launching an online game as part of its latest Think! campaign.
The game is called The Code of Everand and is of the ‘massively multi-player’ variety, similar in concept to well-known commercial titles such as World of Warcraft and Second Life. Its virtual world aims to help children develop the skills they need to deal with the dangers of the real world road network.
See the story here and discuss it in the forum.
Video Game to Help Teach Engineering
Through a $199,986 grant from the National Science Foundation, a group of professors is creating a virtual-reality, theme-based computer game system to increase student engineering literacy levels or comprehension of various texts in engineering settings.