Carnegie Mellon Qatar Spotlights Technology and Entertainment
DOHA—Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) co-director Don Marinelli last Wednesday told a crowd of students, staff and faculty at Education City that the future looks bright for students who “learn how to learn.” He detailed the ETC’s interdisciplinary approach, and went on to explain how Education City was similar to it for bringing together on one campus diverse academic fields. He went on to give examples of the demand for his graduates from companies such as Electronic Arts.
“Every day I get requests for students who are able to think beyond programming, students who also think about design, music, drama, even politics,” Marinelli said. “With the interdisciplinary resources of all the universities here at Education City, I see tremendous potential for students.”
Marinelli was referring to the five universities with branches at Education City—Carnegie Mellon, Virginia Commonwealth, Weill Cornell, Texas A&M, and Georgetown—and the opportunity students have to work together across educational boundaries. Each university brings to campus its own specialty—computer science and business, arts, medicine, engineering and policy, respectively—as well as its own unique tradition of education. He cited as an example Carnegie Mellon’s U.S.-Arab Encounters course, which is taught simultaneously in Pittsburgh and Doha and has students enrolled from three of the universities.
“Here is a class that looks at contemporary political issues between Arab and American countries, that puts students in real-time discussion across the Education City campus and across the world.” Marinelli said.
Marinelli was in town with a group of his students (Asi Barak, co-producer; Eric Brown, co-producer; Eric Keylor, programmer; Olive Lin, artist/programmer; Tim Sweeney, lead designer and Victoria Webb, writer) who recently developed an educational video simulation game called PeaceMaker. In it, players get the chance to act as either leader in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The game simulates real-world consequences for actions taken to counter violence in the region, and the player wins or loses according to how well he negotiates among a variety of choices. The game was tested by students taking the U.S.-Arab Encounters course.
“I had a lot of fun playing this from each perspective,” said Nora Al-Subai, a sophomore computer science sophomore taking the course. “Having real news events embedded in the game has changed how I view the different aspects of conflict resolution. Sometimes now in class we use examples from the game to express what we want to say.”
More information can be found at http://www.qatar.cmu.edu/ and http://www.etc.cmu.edu/ .
