Episode Details

Anthony Godfrey:
Hello and welcome to the Supercast. I'm your host, Superintendent Anthony Godfrey. They used their considerable talents to create a virtual reality game, which is now receiving some amazing accolades.

On this episode of the Supercast, meet the Digital Media students at JATC North who designed a three-dimensional virtual reality game that's garnering a lot of attention. Find out how their game transports people into a different world using the illusion of being there.

We are at JATC North to learn more about the Digital Media program. We're here with the instructor and some students who have won State and are headed to Nationals. So first introduce yourself and tell me a little bit about the course you teach.

Lisa Wadzeck:
Hi, my name is Lisa Wadzeck. I teach Digital Media at the JATC. Basically, it's a place where you can come and be creative and research all the careers that revolve around being creative and working in technology, such as animation and video game production.

Anthony Godfrey:
And it's that combination, creativity and technology. There's a wide range of opportunity within that combination. We spoke briefly on a previous podcast and we've been wanting to come back for a while now. And this award-winning group is the best excuse ever to come back and talk with you more about what happens in the class. But for those who may not have heard before, tell me a little bit about the range of student interests that you meet in this class and the range of students who might be interested in taking a course like this.

Lisa Wadzeck:
We have everyone that just loves to draw and hasn't really thought about what careers might be related to that and can research where they can go with graphic design and illustration and magazine layout, those types of things, to students who've had programming but want to see how to apply that to making video games and creating their own assets to make the video games. We have several students interested in audio production and video production. We've got 2D and 3D animations. We have several students who are interested in making their own films, writing their own music and score for films or just music for bands in general, photography.

Anthony Godfrey:
So there are all kinds of outlets for creativity in the class.

Lisa Wadzeck:
Absolutely.

Anthony Godfrey:
Tell me a little bit about the competition and project that we're going to explore today.

Lisa Wadzeck:
So one thing that's really neat, and I am so proud of my students for, is because this is a new technology, I do not have any training in this. We've had to dive in together and when I say together, mostly the students have researched how to make this work. My program does have some game design background but making that work on a VR is a different approach with the types of code and things that you need to use. So they've had to go out and research what works best to make the mechanics and the activities that they want to experience.

But ultimately they took a theme from the Technology Student Association they gave that was encouraging students to be more healthy and physically active. They completely planned this original game of what is the experience going to be like. What is it going to look like? What do we need to model? What do we need to code? And then also come up with their own plan of deadlines and responsibil