"Rethinking Design" at WEF 2019

As part of the RETHINKING DESIGN exhibition, the Game Technology Center invited visitors to design, build, and play – in essence, to become game designers. In just a few minutes, creative ideas become a project plan and visitors using the Game Creator app build their own virtual world by coding and using art assets captured from the real world. Learning by doing, visitors actually design a professional-looking game and play their game in a test session.

The Game Creator app demonstrates some of the concepts that graduate students tackle in the Game Programming Laboratory that serves as a capstone course in the Computer Science program and reinforces core Computer Science concepts and specialized topics in Visual Computing. In the lab, students work in small teams to design, develop, test, and deploy a novel video game from scratch. In addition to the technical focus on aspects of game development - such as rendering, animation, simulation, physics, and artificial intelligence - the course also cultivates creative thinking and “soft skills” such as team work, effective communication, time management, and leadership.