In February, the School of Visual Arts and Design received an Undergraduate Education Pilot Project grant from UCF to develop an innovative model for online instruction. The resulting course, entitled Adventures in Emerging Media, is based on the choose your own adventure novels that were popular in the 1970s and 1980s. These stories allowed readers to choose their own narrative pathways through adventure novels. A key element of this experience was the merger between storytelling and interactivity.
This summer, SVAD faculty members Jon Friskics, Robb Lindgren, and Rudy McDaniel designed the course and collected module materials from more than 14 participating faculty members in Digital Media and other departments. A number of students participated in the production of this course. Digital Media alumni Jon Geilen and Brittney Kernan, along with SVAD undergraduate students David Miranda and Heidi Buehrer, participated in the design of course materials by developing custom art work, video materials, and scripting in PHP and MySQL. Read the complete article.