Source: Medill News
Gamers’ obsessions vary. It could be jacking an Escalade in Liberty City; creating a new avatar in a computer virtual world, or even pulling out an old school Nintendo to dominate in “Paperboy.”
But learning how to create the newest obsession is a secondary part of the curriculum for students in game development and computer science. Instead, they are learning a different set of skills, one that mom’s worldwide pull their hair out trying to teach their own children: how to work well with others.
“Talent is important, but it falls below several other qualities on the list: team player, accountability, showing up, and collaboration,” said Howard Tullman, president and chief executive officer of Chicago-based Flashpoint: The Academy of Media Arts and Sciences.
Leading a tour group of about 100 parents and potential students, Tullman repeatedly emphasized that attending Flashpoint is not a lackadaisical undertaking. The two years at the academy more closely resemble two years of work experience than a typical undergraduate education. Currently, 60 of the 275 students going into their second year at Flashpoint are game development students.
“We are interested in turning out people who are complete digital professionals,” he said. “They know how to work with a budget, they can communicate, read and write. The focus is having a job to go to at the end, developing a real world portfolio.”
A similar theme runs through the game development course at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The course is part of the four-year computer science program at the university and is co-taught through teleconferencing with instructors at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.
Program director Jason Leigh assigns the 30 or so students into teams of four, with two members in each location to force the students into honing their collaboration skills.
“They learn that one of the most difficult challenges is maintaining awareness of what the other half of the team is doing,” he said. “The teams that establish strong protocols for communication are usually ones that succeed. Interestingly, the teams that did the most poorly this semester were the ones that were entirely co-located.”
The detachment took awhile to get used to, according to computer science major Jason Demeter, but the students got the hang of it towards the end of the semester.
“It was a challenge, and it was very different developmentwise,” he said. “One of the things we picked up real quick was to learn how to not talk over each other when we’re talking over the internet, because everybody’s got something to say and if everybody’s talking at the same time, nobody can hear anything.”
The experience would definitely make future situations much easier, Demeter said.
And in an increasingly global world, similar situations will not be all that unusual, according to Leigh.
“As companies increasingly become multinational entities, it’s important that students broaden their communications skills to include knowing how to deal with working over great distances,” he said.
The speed at which technology changes plays a role in why game development instructors put such an emphasis on skills outside that technology, but that doesn’t mean they ignore it completely.
“Since most undergrads take about four years to graduate, I want to make sure that we teach them about things that will likely be widely available in four years, so that they are not obsolete by the time they graduate,” Leigh said. “Rather, they are poised to be the leaders in their field.”
This semester, Leigh’s game development students created games on a multitouch table, which is like a much larger version of an iPhone, only one that can register many touches at the same time. And Flashpoint is working on Augmented Reality – interactive images that function as barcodes on a piece of paper or T-shirt and pop up in 3-D when registered by a webcam.
Both Leigh and Tullman stressed that it is the foundation of skills underlying work with technology that provides the students with an edge when working with the newest gadgets out there.
“That’s our job, to keep pushing the envelope, to give them a unique opportunity,” Tullman said. “We want them to be responsible, good project managers, and then send them out to vibrate a little in the world.”
Publish Date:
06-11-2009
