Game Design, Development, and Arts News

With the COVID-19 pandemic in full swing, Dartmouth College student Clara Pakman decided to take a “gap year” and focus on experiential learning. This fall, her COVID gap year led her to RIT, for a unique course that she had always wanted to take.

Women in the United States and in the United Kingdom fought for voting rights on either side of the Atlantic Ocean in the early 20th century, protesting for suffrage by picketing, going on hunger strikes, and using a savvy poster campaign. RIT students this semester dug into the suffrage movement’s use of graphic arts to design and create a digital exhibit of historical posters from Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library.

As the 2020 election results come in Nov. 3, civic hackers at RIT want to remind people about the power of technology and how it can be used for good. At RIT’s Election Day Hackathon, students, faculty, staff, and community members will analyze civic problems in the local community, state, and country and propose projects to address them.

David Borkholder, Linwei Wang, Caroline Easton, and Adam Smith, part of RIT's Personalized Healthcare Technology signature research initiative, recently won a Catalyst Award from the National Academy of Medicine for their project, “Improving Health for the Aging through Daily Vital Signs Monitoring.”

Many faculty and alumni of RIT's School of Film and Animation were part of the creative team for a documentary selected for a handful of festivals.

Matt Huenerfauth, professor and expert in computing accessibility research, is part of a team that has been awarded a National Science Foundation grant to use artificial intelligence to better understand the role of facial expressions in signed and spoken languages.

A class of RIT students is taking part in an international game design and development competition to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic and flatten the curve.

RIT students are creatively connecting with each other, using applications like Discord and Slack to virtually study and socialize day and night.

While all educators are contending with new challenges of teaching in the middle of a pandemic, teaching in the arts—a traditionally hands-on process—represents unique challenges.

While many college athletics are on a timeout during the pandemic, esports at RIT are plugged in and fully operational. This semester, RIT Esports has student groups playing 15 different competitive games, along with four teams to support esports operations. As teams begin their fall leagues, students are finding different ways to practice and scrimmage in a socially distanced manner.

Through a partnership with the popular online magazine, Vignelli Center lectures are being rebroadcast by Design Milk. The semester's first event featured an inspiring talk by creativity strategist Natalie Nixon.

Despite restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, students at RIT are still finding ways to participate in hundreds of clubs and organizations this semester, including dancing, designing games, and even skydiving.