Showing posts with label Lan Party. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lan Party. Show all posts

Friday, April 24, 2009

Time to Celebrate

Wow it is hard to believe but a year ago Sarah and Ray were newly hired at the EMC. We were not in the Champlain Mill. We did not know Michel. We were not working with Peter Bingham on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant to create games for patients with CF. We were not working with the marvelous crew at Population Media Center and Aminata and Leyla at the UNFPA on the game to address Violence Against Women. Heather Kelley was not with us. And Megan Frenzen was not at Champlain! South Africa was a distant place with people we did not know. Ken was not working with us. We had not worked with Paul, Tom, and Paul at IBM. There was no Teletrust or "Disaster Master". We were searching for funds to work on the Info Lit games and did not know Andy! 

Wow! We have a to celebrate—the efforts of hard working Champlain faculty, staff and administrators. The incredible creativity and work of 114 Champlain students! The commitment of all our partners, who now are our friends. And celebrate we shall! Please join us  Thursday, April 30, 2009 5:00 PM-9:00 PM (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada) for a party in the Mill—games, art creation, pizza, and I hear a disco ball. I am especially looking forward to sharing the video magic of our video blog crew! Come join us!

The sad piece is that Champlain graduation is May 9th and we will miss those students we will be losing!!!! Come celebrate what they have brought to us all!

Sunday, December 14, 2008

The EMC's first official LAN Party!

What do you get when you combine:
  • 40+ Students...
  • 7 Large Pizza's from Papa Franks in Winooski...
  • 96 cans of soda, 4 pounds of candy, 100 mini bags of chips, 36 bottles of water, 72 cookies...
  • The Emergent Media Center Lab computers loaded with the America's Army Game...
  • America's Army Game Schwag...
  • ...And 2 Champlain College Student maps that have been released through America's Army Game website?
A HUGE LAN Party celebration! :o)

Screen Shot of "District" AA Map

Screen Shot of "Canyon" AA Map

This was a big deal for the two teams who invested 2500+ hours in creating two, well-designed, official America's Army Maps which were released on Thursday, December 11th! Even prior to that, there was information floating around from America's Army that got forums buzzing with interest. Some of the students followed the forums and game servers around the globe playing their maps and by the next day, there were 9 servers playing "District" and 16 playing "Canyon". During this post (two days later), 23 servers are playing "District" and 29 are playing "Canyon". May not sound like a lot, but these maps are gaining ground in TWO days! All Thursday and Friday, I had both teams intermittently informing me about their news updates via the web... It was as if I accidentally subscribed to a cool RSS news feed: I was getting updates every half hour!

I couldn't help, but be proud of them for accomplishing what they did. The party was to honor the hours and accomplishment all of them made. It wasn't an easy task that they took on, but it definitely is now a rewarding one. In fact, we played the two maps beyond the two hours originally planned for the party. We went from 5pm to 1am in the early morning! Best yet, no student playing ever got bored playing the maps.

On a personal level, I know what it's like to have someone admire your work, but I don't think I could imagine how they've been feeling, all week and through today, at this type of scale.

Talking about admiration, apparently someone posted a YouTube video with a fly-through of the student's map just yesterday and at this time of me typing this post; it had a total of 95 hits.


And to give those reading this post some more content found on the web (Google brings up 9,000+ hits), here are just a few other spots about both maps:
I'm looking forward to another couple of sessions playing these maps in the future. Even more so, I'm looking forward to what these students, and others at the EMC, will accomplish next...