Art School - Another Application
My ex husband is a computer science professor and a few years ago he was tasked with figuring out how to increase enrollment for his department. With off shoring of our technology jobs fewer and fewer people are going into computer science as a major. Hard to blame them if there are no jobs. But it will be a travesty for this country if the decline continues as we will surely lose our technological edge.
But that is beside the point of this post. What my rather clever ex came up with for the solution was to create a new degree program for game development, with a focus on socially conscious gaming. Denver University is one of only two or three universities in the country to offer such a degree (although more are jumping on the bandwagon).
The degree program is a joint program between Computer Science and Art and Digital Media Studies. The students must take classes in all departments. The Art and Computer Science departments working together, when I was a grad/undergrad in computer science 15-20 years ago this was a concept that noone would have ever considered.
I think it’s very cool. More information is on the University website. The program is in it’s first year and it has been successful in increasing enrollment.
In addition to the degree program they also started a summer game camp for high school kids with a focus on outreach to at risk kids. My ex is a good guy (read the article for details), but better as an ex than husband.
Posted by Lisa in: About Me
Cathy Kleeman said,
July 14, 2006 @ 4:24 am
My son would have enrolled in this degree program in a millisecond. He majored in computer science and graphic arts and now owns an “e-learning group and customs solutions” company. I’m sure he would much rather own a company that writes computer games!
Omega said,
July 14, 2006 @ 4:44 am
I was born far too early for this - how I would have loved to study something like this! My husband was one of the first to study computing at Edinburgh University, back in the dark ages. I always thought that studying machine intelligence would be fascinating. My degree is in philosophy with a very strong leaning towards aesthetics, and we had a lecture in a course on perception about how the MI department was trying to get a machine to tell the difference between a mug and a cup.
I knew as soon as I saw a Xerox Star in 1981 that that’s what I wanted - but it was quite a few years before I managed to get going making art on my computer.
Lisa Call said,
July 14, 2006 @ 5:09 am
I think my son would love this degree program - although having dad as the head of the program is an issue for him. Kind of hard to blame him but it is totally cool.
Omega - your degree sounds interesting - you would have loved artificial intelligence (although I have to admit this area of CS was not for me - took just one class and didn’t get into it).
I think interdisciplinary studies are so much more enriching. I tried to minor in Russian History & Sociology while working on my computer science PhD but my advisor shot it down. He wasn’t so fond of me taking Russian language classes either. So this is part of why I never finished the PhD - I couldn’t get past the minor - he wanted me to do statistics - I hated it. So I switched to “history of science” another of the semi “related” minors. Yawn - I just didn’t care. Back then well rounded geeks weren’t smiled upon - at least by my advisor.