[game_edu] Opportunities for Student Projects

[Ian Schreiber]

Hi everyone,

Today I'm writing as one of the directors of Global Game Jam. Last year we had some students involved in promoting the event; one team helped prepare part of the video keynote last year. You may have seen the keynote, but might not have known this was part of an assigned project for some Communications media students.

Since that went so well, this year we wanted to pitch this idea while we have some time. There are some great ways for students to get involved with GGJ and a great opportunity for faculty who want to incorporate a global event into their course content. For those of you who run project-based courses where you like to see students working on something with real-world impact, this might be an opportunity for your students. For example, here are some opportunities we were thinking of on our
 own:

* Preparing the keynote video: taking the videos submitted by our keynote speakers and doing video post-processing on them to put together a single unified viewing experience.
* Event coverage: media, communications, or technology students could come up with new ways to share live content between remote sites. In previous years we've used webcams over Ustream which worked well to show locations, but was not very interactive and was hard to capture the energy and people behind the jams.
* Cross-site collaboration: In the past we've had jammers who worked on remotely distributed teams. While we do insist on jammers being at a physical location, having a team formed among several locations is a great way to form links between sites. What kinds of tools might a student team be able to create to facilitate team matchmaking, collaboration, live file sharing, or any other challenges?
* Post-event gameplay: when thousands of games are
 created in a single weekend, how would anyone know where to begin if they wanted to just show up and play/rate a game? Maybe students could design and develop an interface to facilitate play (anything from tying the play of games to Facebook, to gamifying or incentivizing the review process).

These are just examples; you or your students may have other ideas. Our GGJ team can support these projects with advice and some oversight, but keep in mind these are things we don't have the resources or funding to deliver on our own.

Let us know your thoughts and interests, if this is something you think would be of interest to you, your colleagues, or your students. Send us an email at
     projects at globalgamejam.org
and we'll discuss. You can also feel free to email me directly off-list.

- Ian
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