UAT Alum Erin Ali is Playing to Win
October 15, 2020 | by
At the end of July, UAT students and alumni wrapped up the summer semester by competing in the Summer 2020 UAT Game Jam. Hosted online from July 17–26, the 9-day jam was designed to be open to all levels, including those who had never even made a game before, with professors available on Discord to mentor and help solve problems. Veteran jammers and experienced developers were also strongly encouraged to partner with and mentor the newbies.
Student-led multimedia production company at UAT brings together innovation, creativity and a group of nerds. BunchOfNerds (BON) was created as a club for students to create projects and network.
What does financial literacy mean? You see articles on high schools graduating students who know math and how to read and write, but they are lacking fundamental life skills, including financial literacy. When many young adults move out, they still don’t know how to budget, pay bills or get insurance.
Did you know UAT has their own version of Shark Tank, coined Tech Tank, where students pitch their hypothetical business ideas to a panel of real-world potential investors, business owners and entrepreneurs. The goal of Tech Tank is to see who can give the best pitch, arrive the most prepared and encourage the panel to invest in their idea.
Rebecca Levasseur
Ricky Martinez knows how to hustle. As an Excel Leader and Student Mentor, Ricky is a familiar face to all on the University of Advancing Technology (UAT) campus. He’s also active in clubs, is double-majoring in Game Programming and Robotics and Embedded Systems and works in the UAT Cafe.
Playing online video games is like running through a minefield of curse words. Watch Your Language is a tool kit trying to make the gaming experience more family friendly.
This Student Innovation Project (SIP), created by duo Rocky Vargas and Michael Shepherd, monitors what players are saying and flags inappropriate words. Rocky explains, “Our innovation claim is that gameplay is intensified by turning to foul language gamers use into a mechanic for punishment.”
There isn’t anything for gaming that uses speech recognition this way. If Watch Your Language detects vulgar words, alarms sound and the monitor will display the word. This mechanic is meant to monitor in real-time and can be universally used because there is a coded element that can be written for any word.
Because of the code, this technology can expand into more than just the gaming industry. Software and other technologies written in code can apply Watch Your Language if it’s compatible with a microphone.
Rocky wrote the original code to detect specific words and activated the streaming portion of this SIP. Michael polished the code and hooked it all up.
Do you want to drive the future of games? Check out UAT’s Game Programming degree.
Looters of the Arcane is a post-modern survival horror game where players travel to past eras to find mysterious objects. With the use of a Time Sphere, players can collect these objects for the antiquities company they currently work for in the distant future.
University of Advancing Technology (UAT) students love unwinding with video games after a long day of classes and studying. Students thrive when they have a healthy school-life balance and playing cult classic video games is one way they relax while out of class.
