CUNY’s New York City College of Technology interns, from left to right: Dimple Mirpuri, Tamanda Msosa, Lindelle Anglin, Daiane Bushey, Professor Adam Wilson.
This Spring 2015 marks our first college Internship program associated with Gordon Education’s Take the Stage. Two colleges in NYC participated in our internship program: CUNY’s NYC College of Technology in Brooklyn and The School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. In Fall 2014, I spoke with college professors at both institutions who facilitated in putting this internship program into motion. Professor Adam Wilson at CUNY City Tech and Professor Kat Llewellyn at School of Visual Arts. Kat Llewellyn actually did some of the backgrounds and animation on the actual episode as well. Both are super creative and knowledgeable in their fields.
INTERNSHIP PROJECT #1 – “BE A MAESTRO” – A game to teach kids music theory
In the fall 2014, I pitched a few different game ideas to the class that have to do with the performing arts. The music game got the largest response, so we ran with that. The concept is for kids to practice identifying pitch and learn musical notation. Eventually, the game will have different levels of difficulty and another function for kids to compose their very own songs.
A LOT goes into building a computer game from scratch. It’s pretty amazing to watch these coders hard at work problem solving, writing code and matching their code to each other’s work. Every detail has to be coded: like when when you push x, what happens to y. I sat in on a few coding sessions to learn all that went into it, though it would probably take me a few years to get a decent grasp on all of it.
The graphic designers actually created a ton more amazing graphics and images than we ended up using for our prototype. They used SVG(Scalable Vector Graphics) for the images and actually created a video tutorial. We hope to use their great designs when we complete the full version of the game.
Check out the final prototype of the game below where we used Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”:
This prototype may be a little challenging for young people, but one can understand the concept.
Be a Maestro Internship team:
CUNY’s New York City College of Technology Lindelle Anglin, Software Engineer Daiane Bushey, Software Engineer Dimple Mirpuri, Software Engineer Tamanda Msosa, Software Engineer
School of Visual Arts Megan Dobkin, Graphic Designer Angelica Mercado, Graphic Designer
INTERNSHIP PROJECT #2 – “Gabby’s Pizza Pie Palace” – An educational video that teaches fractions through visual arts
As part of our educational initiative, we create educational videos that teach the academics through the arts in a fun and interactive way. In this video, you see we are teaching fractions (halves, quarters, eighths) while the students can participate in a visual arts/crafts activity. Video comes with worksheet below:
Our sole intern on this project, Kaitlyn, created multiple backgrounds for this game until we decided on this exact one in the video. She also did the animations and time-lapse video.
Worksheet:
School of Visual Arts, ’15 Kaitlyn Carroll, Graphic Design and Animation Intern “Gabby’s Pizza Pie Palace”