GDC 2007: Academic Workshop

The IGDA Education SIG is very happy to announce one of our initiatives is coming to fruition. At the upcoming Game Developer’s Conference we will be having an intense 2-day workshop that will focus on innovation and best practices in curriculum design and teaching methods for game development education.

There will be inspirational lectures, exploration of model curricula, case blasts, interactive hands-on sessions as well as great opportunities for networking and discussion throughout the workshop. We hope to present practical and philosophical advice for teaching in games. It is our hope that attendees will leave with useful examples and ideas on how to best develop and/or reinvigorate game development curricula in their institution.

As a community we have a lot to share with each other. There are those of you out there that want to impact the curriculum framework we are developing, this is your chance. We hope your wisdom and experience will help us shape this iteration of the framework. The workshop will provide opportunities for you to share in various case blasts and classroom teaching example that all of us can take home with us to try in our own programs.

As many of you know the GDC conference is put on by CMP and we (IGDA) have no control over the cost of attendance. The best price option is to purchase a gigapass – it includes the two day tutorial as well as everything else in the conference. The important thing to note is for the biggest price savings, you need to purchase your pass by January 31, 2007.

Here is the link to the workshop: https://www.cmpevents.com/GD07/a.asp?option=C&V=11&SessID=3843

If you plan on attending and feel that you have an innovative classroom exercise that you use in your own class and want to share it with your peers, please contact us.

I would like to take a moment and thank Drew Davidson and his committee for all of their hard work in developing such an outstanding workshop for us this year.

We look forward to seeing many of you at the workshop, please contact me with any questions.

Susan


Prof. Susan Gold
IGDA Education SIG Chairperson

Susan's Field Trip - final post

So I am home from our LA trip, my apologies for not posting sooner. I must say the entire trip was exhausting, but no matter how tired I am, it does not discount the amount of information and cool things we got to see first hand.

For those of you interested in how I put this trip together, I would be happy to share the info on how I make it happen. One, we add a lab fee to the class to pay for the expenses. It is not an ordinary type of field trip – travel, food, transportation cost, all add up and would kill our department budget. However, the experience is so valuable my students are willing to pay the fee (this year the fee was $750). When I plan our trips I try to visit three places a day. Easier said then done, especially since I am not a LA native, nor do I know my way around that well. The other thing I use is Yahoo maps, (not that they are always right), but it gives me a really good idea of where things are located in relation to one another – very important. I also plan free time, to give students a little bit of time to explore the area on their own. This year’s student group may have gotten into a little mischief (trying to find a hookah bar), but they always showed up on time in the morning.

The other thing you might be interested in is how I get in to all of these companies. There is no easy answer, networking at conferences, is one way. My primary way is just cold calling and asking the receptionist who to talk to, labor intensive, but well worth the effort.

This year I worked really hard not to have duplications – it is true, once you see a hundred people working in cubes – everything looks pretty much the same. I think it is important to show students the different cultures. From a students vantage point they can visualize if they would want to work there. One of the questions I ask during our visits, do you have fun? Now, everyone says yes, but how they say yes and looking around at the faces of the employees is a true giveaway.

As for the last days of our trip, it was full of information. First off, Scot Boyd at R&H gave us the best tour ever. One Rhythm & Hues – John Hues was one of the first people to put computer graphics into film – The Black Hole was the first film with 10 seconds of CG. Second, R&H has a tremendous amount of history, we were shown everything from film editorial – including an antique moviola and flatbed editor, to their two 70 terabyte – one for storage and one for pipeline. R&H developed the first talking animals (Babe, Dogs & Cats and soon Charlotte’s Web). In talking to some of their artist, they suggested using Body Paint software because it allows you to paint in 3D. The visit was awesome as usual.

We also visited Infinity Ward at their new space. They are growing and I am looking forward to seeing their next game. At Infinity and many other places, they suggested that students have foundation art skills as software is easily outdated and methods will change. In our talks they suggested using forums like CG Talk to get feed back – as opposed to only relying on teachers and other students for critique. “There are always people that are better that you, put your egos away.” I think that is very sound advice. They suggested tailoring portfolios to fit the company they are applying to – even for internships.

Our last day was spent at The Post Group and USC’s Game Lab. I was really impressed with what Tracy and her team have done with their program. It is always hard to play show and tell to the competition, but in truth, it really isn’t. It is a good idea to show students what other students need to do for the degrees, raising the bar on what is needed to succeed.

I have tons of photos from the trip, if you are interested in seeing more, I’ll be happy to send you a few. I want to thank the following people for making the trip a huge success: Bary W Pollack – my co-chair, House of Moves, Activision, Naughty Dog, Imageworks, Blur, Lou Castle at EA, Scot Boyd at Rhythm & Hues, Infinity Ward, The Post Group and Tracy Fullerton at USC’s Game Lab – and of course my students.


Susan

Susan Gold
IGDA Education Chair

Susan's LA Field Trip, Day 2

LA Field Trip
Day 2
Imageworks
Blur Studios
Electronic Arts

What a great day – but not a whole lot of stuff I can actually show you (NDA’s and all). We started at Sony’s Imageworks, one of the largest visual effects/post houses in the world. Now Imageworks is also doing full-length animated features as well – Open Season just came out at the end of September and Surf’s Up will be coming out in 2007. When talking to Steve Prawat, Imagework’s Senior Coordinator of Training & Artist Development we asked him what he thought was the best way to get into the industry – his answer… GAMES. Personally, I think this is a rather antiquated to think that the games genre is easier to break into than film. Maybe this might have been the case early on, but now I know that people in both of our industries are interchangeable. I personally know several people that have gone back and forth from games to film. Now with the NextGen graphics I think everything is equal.

Our second stop was to one of my favorite studios in all of Los Angeles, Blur. If you ever watch your game cinematics then you have seen Blur’s work (Warhammer 40,000, Hellgate London, Fight Club, Spiderman 2, Castle Wolfenstein to name a few). The reason I love this studio is due to their energy, atmosphere, creativeness and work culture, they really love what they do. We happen to be there for their daily game break (Battlefield and Quake). Everyone stops for 45 minutes each day to clear their heads and get any of their aggression out. Blur also has been working on a few of their own animated shorts – have you seen Rockfish? In the Rough? Gopher Broke? When are these guys going to make a full length feature?

The last stop for the day was Electronic Arts to meet with Lou Castle, (I think his title is VP of Creative Development). I met Lou a few years ago when he came to see us on campus. Lou is a true renaissance man, both artist and programmer (with a little business and entrepreneurship for seasoning). He shared with us some rather sage advice and was very encouraging to the students. The one thing that my students remarked upon the most was the importance to have young blood on the development side. Not just because they can sit in a chair modeling for 8-10 hours a day without complaining, but because they are the market for which EA targets in their games. Needless to say, we learned a lot on this visit to EA.

This is just a quick slide show of images – no video today.



Tomorrow we are visiting Rhythm & Hues and Infinity Ward.

Susan

Susan Gold
IGDA Education Chair

Susan's LA Field Trip, Day 1

LA Field Trip
Day 1
Vicon / House of Moves
Activision
Naughty Dog

Our day started with a trip to the House of Moves (which was purchased by the MoCap camera maker Vicon). They are now one of the largest and well known Motion Capture studios in the country. I have visited Moves for the past five years in multiple locations – why? they keep needing to move due to their rapid growth. What was really fun was that we got to put a few students in MoCap suits and let them play in front of the cameras. Our hosts went all out and will even allow us to download our capture data. Currently Moves use several different softwares to do real time visualization and capture: IQ, Motion Builder and Diva. Vicon/Moves has been working rather tirelessly on software development and will be introducing Blade in the near future. We learned a lot about the advances in facial MoCap, did you know in Spiderman 3 they used 172 facial markers? I could not even imagine have 172 3mm markers stuck to my face. Now they even have 1.5mm markers so they fit even more markers.

We met Activision’s recruiters Patricia Bojorquez and Suzanne Whelpley for lunch. We had an opportunity to discuss the realities of landing jobs at Activision and in the industry. I am sure you are wondering if they had any pearls of wisdom for having our students land jobs in the industry? – finding people that work well in collaborative teams. This is something that I am told all of the time. I think this is something we should all work on with our students. On a very positive note we learned that Activision is trying to expand their internship program. Last year they had 50 internships at their various studios and corporate headquarters. They are hoping to grow the program over the next year. I hope to get Stephen Jacobs to talk to them for inclusion in our database of internships and coop’s.

Our last studio visit for the day was with Naught Dog. They are working on a new title that does not include Jak or any other stylized cartoon characters. It is a real departure for them, a real photorealistic world, it looks great and I wish them good luck. They too are in a growth spurt – currently with ~75 people. We were told their studio demographics are 50% artists, 25% programmers, the last 25% administrative. We spent the afternoon with their Art Director and of course my art students had a lot of programming questions. As for my programming students, they are very quiet. They tried to do everything possible to dissuade my students from a career in the game industry…. sorry guys, it didn’t.

I wanted to get this up as soon as possible so I just slapped together this video of images from today’s adventures.





I hope to give you daily updates - tomorrow is Imageworks, Blur & EA.

Susan

Susan Gold
IGDA Education SIG Chairperson

Google for (Games) Educators?

Google recently announced their Google for Educators website, which is designed specifically to help educators learn how to use Google tools to enhance their classes. On the introductory page, they encourage teachers who are successful in doing so to mail the Google team with their story so that it can be featured for other teachers. They even provide links for teachers to use to share their Google tool-related class ideas with others.

It's good to see Google encouraging this kind of knowledge-sharing amongst educators. Hopefully relatively high-profile initiatives like this one will help convince educators that activities like contributing to the IGDA's games education curriculum knowledge base is a great way to help keep the ideas fresh and the challenges engaging for students.

I also thought it was a nice touch that they provide an email newsletter mailing list sign-up right on the front page, as email seems to be just in terms of meeting the technical proficiencies and interests of the average educator these days. This kind of thoughtfulness about how to effectively work together with educators is something we also strive for in the Education SIG.

Perhaps in the near future the IGDA wiki will include pages suggesting how games educators in particular can make good use of Google tools. I like the way Google took the time to write pages catered to describe the 12 featured tools in a way that's (hopefully) clear and easily understood by educators; perhaps some similar pages catered to games education on our wiki would be useful. This kind of collaboration within our community is certainly something Google would like to see in response to their announcement and something that could be richly rewarding for all those who participate.

If you have any thoughts on this or would like to contribute in any way, please feel free to just go add something to the wiki straight away, leave a comment on this post, or email us at education_sig@igda.org.

Darren Torpey
Technology Co-Officer

Studio Visits in LA

Next week I head to Los Angeles for our annual student trip to visit studios and meet with industry leaders. I have been rather fortunate over the past five years to acquire some amazing contacts from within industry. Just so you know, I had very few introductions when I started taking students to LA; most of my contacts have been through old fashion cold calling. What I have found was that it was very important to show my students the inside of the industry. I don’t want them to have grand illusions of life in the game industry: I want them to know the realities. I do that by exposing students to what lies behind the doorways of the studios. The trip is not an ominous warning, more like a wake up call. I try to show them what it is like to work and be creative every day, the hard work and long hours. I get to introduce them to people that love what they are doing and also can talk to them about balancing life. Otherwise, we all know, the game industry is the wrong place for a lot people that do not have the stamina.

I should note, that the field trip is a part of a two-semester course. We are happy if we retain 50% of our students for the second semester. The primary reason cited by students for not taking the second semester, “I don’t want to work that hard.” I know a 50% drop rate is high, but to be recruited in this industry, you need to be a real self-motivator, willing to spend the time to do what needs to done. I rather like the fact that those looking for the glamour of the job end up dropping out, those that do stay in for the second semester are much better for it, especially when it comes to their collaborative work.

The other thing that I am really interested in doing on the trip is exposing my students to the wealth of possibilities there are within the industry. How many students really know what roles there are within a big company like EA or a smaller studio like Naughty Dog or Pandemic? I like the field trip because the students can start to visualize themselves working and living the life of a professional in the industry.

What is most exciting is that this year is that I will be able to share the experience I have with my students with you and everyone else in our community. I will do my best to give you the pearls of wisdom they share with me.

Susan

Susan Gold
IGDA Education SIG Chairperson

Tech Meeting Round-Up

Susan, Magy, Darren and I had our weekly SIG technology meeting tonight. We got a lot done and managed to keep it under two hours in length!

We discussed the curriculum knowledge base, which we're not quite ready to make public yet, so I'm going to withhold details for now. But it's shaping up to be pretty cool, and it'll be announced here before anywhere else, so stay tuned.

Second, we talked about the EdSIG wiki. We migrated the static contents of the old site initiatives over to the wiki, and are going to grow it (with your help, of course). We have a lot work ahead of us!

The last item on the agenda was the new blog and website, which you're enjoying right now. Everyone liked my concept, so we hit the "Go Live" switch today.

In the coming weeks, we're going to make more headway on the knowledge base, build up the wiki, and post more news here.

Darius Kazemi
Technology Co-Officer

Our New Blog is Live!

Hi everyone, I'm Darius, one of the EdSIG technology officers. I'm excited to announce that the EdSIG site is now a full-fledged blog.

What does this mean to you? Well, for one thing, you can expect a lot more updates here than you saw in the past. This is a group blog, so pretty much every officer of the SIG will have posting capability, so you can keep up to date on what the different parts of our organization are up to.

Also, I'd like to direct your attention to the sidebar. This will be growing over the next few months as the IGDA Education SIG Wiki becomes more robust. But think of this site as your news source, and think of the sidebar as a portal to the wiki, where the meat-and-bones content of the SIG lives.

And of course, you can comment on posts. Do you like what you see? Have a suggestion? Let us know right here!

Thanks,
Darius Kazemi
Technology Co-Officer