Zhao Yang | Gaming Major: Game to Experience Majors at NYUSH

 
Gaming Major is a video game gamifying some course contents to help students at NYUSH to partially experience the courses of a major so that they can learn about the information about that major. NYUSH provides the students with the opportunity to choose their majors based on the students’ will. However, due to the lack of ways to learn about the information of majors at NYUSH and the ineffectiveness of conveying information, the students often have problems knowing and experiencing the majors. Therefore, this project investigates the way to effectively convey information through the media of video games and incorporates the gamification of the major experience to provide students with another way to learn about the major.

The overall game visual style is the 2D pixel art style. This project, for now, only consists of one major to experience, which is Interactive Media Arts (IMA). In this project, there is a virtual 8th floor for the player wandering around. The player can interact with two None Player Characters (NPCs) and experience two foundation courses of IMA, which are Communications Lab and Interactions Lab. The scene of the Communications Lab utilizes the Post-Processing effect to simulate the operation of cameras and provides the player with several challenges to learn the knowledge of the camera, which is one of the core course contents of the Communications Lab. The scene of the Interactions Lab mainly uses LineRederer to simulate the experience of connecting cables with Arduino, which is one of the core course contents of the Interactions Lab.

Since this project simulates the operation of the camera and the experience of connecting circuits with Arduino, both of the scenes provide the student an opportunity to experience part of the real course contents in a virtual environment without getting access to the real hardware. As for the challenges of the course contents, they also provide the player with some real scenarios and let the player practice the use of the virtual hardware. If the project is fully completed, the game not only is a way for students to experience and learn the information about majors but also can be considered a teaching tool as well during the pandemic due to the lack of access to the real hardware.