News
School of Interactive Games and Media

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Professionals interested in learning how to use Unreal Engine to create interactive 3D can now do it online with RIT’s Unreal Engine Foundations Professional Certificate program on edX.

RIT is establishing Open@RIT, an initiative dedicated to supporting all kinds of “open work,” including — but not limited to — open source software, open data, open hardware, open educational resources, Creative Commons licensed work, and open research.

Niantic has donated $400,000 to create a new research lab at RIT that’s focused on location-based games. In the Niantic x RIT Geo Games and Media Research Lab, researchers will work to better understand how people interact with location-based games and how they can be used for good.

RIT’s MAGIC Center and Vicarious Visions (VV), a game studio well-known for some of the industry’s most iconic franchises, have signed a partnership agreement that will include new collaborations and scholarship opportunities for students in RIT's Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences and College of Art and Design.

A new 15-week program at RIT is teaching people all the skills they need to start a new career in cybersecurity. Starting in July, learners can enroll in RIT’s Cybersecurity Bootcamp, an immersive hands-on training course that will prepare them for critical entry-level roles in the cybersecurity workforce. The program aims to help professionals from all backgrounds and abilities set themselves up to transition into an in-demand career.

In a new game created by an RIT student, players must navigate paranoia and loneliness in order to make it off an isolated ship alive. Sean Arnold ’20 (game design and development) was inspired by his experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic to create an interactive narrative game called The Peresmeshnik.

RIT’s Class of 2020 is getting a bonus opportunity after last week’s virtual conferral of degrees — a ceremony in the video game Minecraft that will allow them to virtually walk across the graduation stage, receive a diploma from “Minecraft Munson” and take a photo with the Tiger statue.