It gives me great pleasure to announce that the Game Design & Development programs have recently received a Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express Innovation Award for 2007. This award will provide matching funds for increased curriculum development, complimentary XNA Creator accounts for our faculty and students, and collaborative opportunities directly with the Microsoft XNA development team. This award is one of six that were awarded globally in 2007 through a world-wide competitive RFP process - we are very proud to have been selected as a place of excellence for our work in Game Design & Development!

RIT joins fellow XNA GSE Innovation Award winners University of Maryland at Baltimore County (UMBC), the Oregon Institute of Technology, Daniel Webster College, DePaul University and the University of Utah in advancing the state of the art in games education. Building upon our existing expertise in this area and the XNA GSE Innovation Award, students at RIT will receive an exceptional educational experience, with resources and expertise not found elsewhere. As a part of the award, RIT will be disseminating portions of its curriculum that deal with XNA as modules for other universities to adopt and expand.

This award firmly establishes RIT as a leader in incorporating XNA based solutions into a technically based education in Game Design & Development. Our students will have hands-on access to state-of-the-art equipment in our Entertainment Technology Laboratory, and this will be enhanced to include XBOX XNA development stations and XNA Creator Accounts. In serving as a model for curriculum development in this area, RIT continues to innovate and provide experiences several years ahead of its peers.

This award also provides enhanced access and relationships directly with the XNA development team at Microsoft, where several RIT alumni are employed. While a number of games-related research projects and educational studies have been generously supported by Microsoft Research, this award marks the first formal collaboration between the Game Design & Development programs and the commercial games division of Microsoft.
Please join me in celebrating this award. I look forward to the coming year as our programs continue to grow!

Sincerely,

Andrew Phelps
Director, Game Design & Development
College of Computing & Information Sciences
Rochester Institute of Technology
amp@it.rit.edu games.rit.edu