“We’ve actually developed the operating budget for the university’s center to incorporate ongoing funding to refresh and update the software on that wall,” Campbell says. “It’s really limitless in terms of the interactive applications that we can develop. We have a number of faculty who are involved in advanced imaging, so you can imagine interacting with a beating, 3-D heart, or anything with that has built-in capacity to service a learning tool as well as an entertainment tool going forward.”
Thu Tran, an independent visual artist and the creative director for CWRU’s media wall says gaming technology adds a distinct quality to a college campus.
She says it creates a fun atmosphere, and that colleges should get used to seeing it on their campuses.
“I feel like, we’ve all grown up with [gaming] at this point, especially if we’re coming up now to go to school,” she says. “We’ve all been exposed to these sort of video games, 3-D graphics, 2-D pixel graphics. It’s a visual language we all know at this point. It’s cool to see it outside of a home console or arcade.”
Tran says gaming technology has a bright future in higher education, especially with K-12 schools exposing students to it early; this includes lessons on how to create their own games and learning how to code.
“I hope to see in general, cooler [games] that get people excited to learn more and live their life,” she says. “Now, I’m looking more into coding and I’ll find tutorials by 12-year-olds. I think they are learning about it now, or it will be more common to learn that at an earlier age…It’s definitely new and exciting and it’d be cool to learn that stuff when you’re a lot younger.”
Gaming Technology Takeaways
• Gaming technology is catching on in higher education, and might appear on a campus near you.
• It encourages student collaboration, interaction and engagement in the classroom, and reduces distractions.
• Gaming technology can be used in the classroom as an interactive teaching tool, or as a large-scale solution like a media wall to attract prospective students.
• Gaming hardware can be repurposed with new software to keep content and games fresh and interesting.
• It may become an educational entity that younger students are accustomed to, especially as they move up to the college level.
If you enjoyed this article and want to receive more valuable industry content like this, click here to sign up for our digital newsletters!
Leave a Reply