Through capitalizing on research in the areas of gaming and virtual community social psychology, RIT is engaged in a project to develop a Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) entitled “The Multi-User Programming Pedagogy for Enhancing Traditional Study” (M.U.P.P.E.T.S.).

The M.U.P.P.E.T.S. system will be aimed specifically at engaging upper-division students in the education of lower-division students through their first-year programming core. The M.U.P.P.E.T.S. team is building upon existing research and technical developments in the field to design and construct a CVE and supporting infrastructure that allows students to write very simple Java® or C# code similar to, and constructed around the same pedagogical issues as, code written in a more traditional course of first year study. As part of the M.U.P.P.E.T.S. system, however, this code can now control objects in a shared virtual world very much like an online massively-multiplayer game that many prospective students are already familiar with. Upper level students also populate the system in a structure of their own, and this population will be aimed at encouraging and rewarding student engagement and peer knowledge-transmission.

Check out the official M.U.P.P.E.T.S. website for more information!

Introductory programming sequences teach the core concepts of the computer science discipline: object-oriented programming, software engineering concepts, data structures, and algorithms.

One of the most often heard complaints in such courses is that they are divorced from the reality of application. We are captivating students by using the diverse field of games as an application area in a CS1-CS3 introductory programming sequence.

This is done starting with Java as a programming language and moving to C# for Programming 2 and Programming 3 so that students learn multiple languages that are commonly used in the workplace. These courses are taught in the studio lab model, where students are able to easily practice what they learn."

Read more about RAPT on the Microsoft web site

RAPT, together with M.U.P.P.E.T.S., now informs the core of the programming sequence for undergraduate Game Design & Development students. All students in the program are invited to participate in our experiments in education and continual effort to prodoce excellent students!

Interactive media are highly complex and at high risk for loss as technologies rapidly become obsolete. The Preserving Virtual Worlds project will explore methods for preserving digital games and interactive fiction. Major activities will include developing basic standards for metadata and content representation and conducting a series of archiving case studies for early video games, electronic literature and Second Life, an interactive multiplayer game. Second Life content participants include Life to the Second Power, Democracy Island and the International Spaceflight Museum. Partners: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (lead), University of Maryland, Stanford University, Rochester Institute of Technology and Linden Lab.

The Preserving Virtual Worlds project is funded by the Preserving Creative America initiative under the National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP) administered by the Library of Congress.

[Above includes excerpt from Library of Congress Press release; 3 August 2007.]

This work is supported by the Library of Congress, and will run Jan 2008 - Jan 2010. For more information download the PDF overview.