This past weekend I volunteered with some fellow alumni of the Masters of Digital Media Program to host a 48-hour Design Jam for the second and third cohorts of our illustrious MDM Program. Based off of the 48-hour Global Game Jam that we had participated in this past January, we challenged the new students to design a game or animation within 48 hours. This was an exciting experience for them to bond over.

It went really well too. While the one person interested in making an animation ended up joining one of the games groups, many games were made and fun was had by all. I had the fortune of helping out one group who wanted to learn a 3D engine in the 48 hours. I taught them the engine I knew was easy to learn in that time frame which is Blender the open source game engine! They not only took to it really quickly, but they also mastered much more of it than even I have. They were really interested in the modelling, while my knowledge lay mostly in Python. It was interesting to watch them come together and make their game so fast. The lesson that warmed my heart at the end was hearing that they had learned to overcome their fear of having to learn something new in such a short time. They felt they could do it again if they wanted to.