CMU ETC Outreach and Engagement

With three elective class sessions remaining, our SAMS students are hard at work on their games.

Our students are working on a parkour game, a car battle game, and a third person adventure game.

Fueled by Veggie Straws and iced tea, our SAMS students are wrapping up the “lessons” portion of our Unreal Engine Game Development elective. Starting next week, the students will split into teams and begin working on their own games.

Pictured are landscapes created last week as part of the landscapes, materials, and scene decoration lesson.

We’re kicking off week 2 of our SAMS Unreal Engine Game Development elective with a lesson on blueprints.

Blueprints are a simplified graphical programming language that allows users to code in Unity without writing C++ by hand, and learning this streamlined process will make the rapid prototyping they’ll be doing for the remainder of the program much faster and easier.

Yesterday marked the beginning of our Summer Academy for Math and Science (SAMS) 2024 elective, “Unreal Engine Game Development”. As part of this 6-week course, 12 rising seniors from across the US will learn the Unreal Engine game development pipeline and work as teams to create games which will be presented at the SAMS Symposium in August!

Classes at the ETC may be out of session for the summer, but our commitment to supporting community partners through Project Baseplate is going strong!

Grace (pictured here with Anthony) is running Brick Clubs this summer at as part of their SOY PGH summer programming!

THANK YOU to those who joined us joined us at our event Building Connections - Brick Clubs and ETC Open House on Friday! It is truly our pleasure to participate in each year. We hope to see our followers at lots of this month!

Interested in attending a Remake Learning Days event yourself? Visit the link in our bio to search events near you!

THANK YOU to those who joined us at our RemakeLearningDays event Building Connections - Brick Clubs and ETC Open House on Friday! It is truly our pleasure to participate in each year. We hope to see our followers at lots more Days this month!

Interested in attending a Remake Learning Days event yourself? Visit the link in our bio to search events near you!

ETC Outreach and Engagement is at Dragon’s Den Pittsburgh!

Since September 2023, ETC Outreach and Engagement have partnered with Homestead based nonprofit to provide Brick Clubs to participants in their after school program.

As part of the Spring 2024 semester, Dragon’s Den are sponsoring a project team who are hoping to bring mixed reality to their ropes course.

Today we accompanied ETC Student Team AR Mixtory to the where they’re studying ephemera left behind by members of Pittsburgh’s original Chinatown which was established in the 1890s and located where Grant Street meets Pittsburgh’s Boulevard of the Allies today.

AR Mixtory are using CMU’s ARENA platform to create a mixed reality experience that highlights the lived experience of some of Pittsburgh’s earliest Chinese settlers.

We’re in the news! Learn more about ETC K-12’s role in the partnership between Carnegie Mellon University and Play Included and what it means for learners and LEGO lovers near you here:

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/news/2024/brick-based-learning

Carnegie Mellon University and Play Included® Bring LEGO® Brick Based Interventions to US CMU has partnered with Play Included® to launch Project Baseplate, a scalable platform for deploying LEGO® brick based activities to children across the U.S. The university's Center for Transformational Play will lead the project's first two initiatives.

It’s Randy Pausch Day!

Randy Pausch Day commemorates the life of ETC Co-Founder Randy Pausch. Pausch’s interdisciplinary teaching methodology and his approach to collaboration are the pillars on which our department stands to this day, and nothing exemplifies this better than the First Penguin Award.

The First Penguin Award is given to students who take the biggest risks in pursuit of their goals. During classroom discussions, Randy reminded students that one penguin had to be brave enough to take the “first dive”. This award is still given to students who cast aside comfort in favor of innovation, and we are proud to display this fragment of his legacy alongside many others at the ETC.

Read more about Randy, his impact on our community, and his legacy at the link in our bio.