“If you walk into a roomful of middle school girls and say ‘Do you want to learn how to program a computer?’, only a few hands will go up,” says Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor Randy Pausch.
“But if you walk in and say ‘Do you want to learn how to tell a story and make a movie?’, all the hands go up.” —Mark Roth —CMU uses game maker’s characters to interest girls in computer programming (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
I interviewed Pausch when he was working at the University of Virginia and I was a PR writer there. He was doing VR at the time. (This was around 1991, so the big VR wave hadn’t crested at the time.)
I came across this article while Googling for Game Maker, a very slick point-and-click tool for creating sprite-based games. A fully functional version is free, but the paid version is only $20. I had used a similar product, Games Factory, but that hasn’t been updated in years. The creator of Game Maker obviously has education in mind — the site’s documentation is written for non-experts.
Of course I’ll be sacrificing power when I choose a point-and-click tool. But people who aren’t planning to be computer programmers can stand to learn quite a lot about the world through picking up the basic concepts of game design, just as people who don’t plan to be novelists can learn from a freshman comp course.
Post was last modified on 24 Apr 2015 9:40 am
Representing the Humanities at Accepted Students Day.
The daughter opens another show. This weekend only.
After learning of his AIDS diagnosis, artist Keith Haring created the work, "Unfinished Painting" (1989),…
Seton Hill students Emily Vohs, Elizabeth Burns, Jake Carnahan-Curcio and Carolyn Jerz in a scene…
Inspiration can come to those with the humblest heart. Caedmon the Cowherd believed he had…
View Comments
Of course they can.
I think journalists have a lot to learn from creative writing courses, too. Writing a gripping headline that fits in the alotted space requires the skills of a poet.
Or people who plan to be novelists cant learn from a newswriting course.