More Workshops at DeVry Arlington
Arlington, VA
May 13
Having completed my visit to RIT in Rochester, New York, I headed to Arlington, Virginia for three days of events at DeVry. I had been there before and enjoyed it a lot -- some of the best students I ever encountered. Although the events went well, the trip started badly when I got to my hotel and found that my booking had mysteriously disappeared. Someone, somewhere, had cancelled it and there were no other hotel rooms to be found in or near Arlington. I ran up a $140 cab fare driving around trying to find one. Even American Express Global Assist was unable to help me. They came to my rescue when I lost my wallet in Zurich, on the way to Santiago, Chile; but in this case they were distinctly disappointing. They found me one hotel room which turned out to be in Richmond, close to a hundred miles away, and when I called back to ask for something else, they found me another one in Arlington, Texas. After that I gave up and slept on the floor of Washington National Airport, as one place where I knew I could stay and be safe, and find transportation in the morning. It was a frustrating and thoroughly uncomfortable time, especially as the airport played loud music all night, presumably to discourage people like me from sleeping there.
May 14
At about 7:30 AM I called Hilton's national reservations number and discovered that, mirabile dictu, my original hotel had rooms available for the next four nights. I caught their shuttle and went blearily back to the place I had started 10 hours before, where the desk staff were kind enough to hurry up the cleaning process and get me a room by 9:30 AM. Check-in time is normally 3 PM, so this was a lucky break. I was supposed to have the 14th free to be a tourist, but in the event I spent the whole day sleeping.
May 15
My first day at the DeVry campus; I went over in the early afternoon and had a chat with the professors, then gave a lecture on job-hunting to the current students while they ate pizza. That evening I went back to my hotel room and cooked up an impromptu lecture on the history of computer programming.
May 16
In the morning I gave the students a game design workshop, then delivered my lecture on programming. I had been asked to address in a class on "why we do object-oriented programming," and I thought it would be fun to start with Ada, Lady Lovelace's program for the Analytical Engine and then work my way forward through FORTRAN, BASIC, Pascal, and finally C++, with examples of code and pictures of some of the old gear that I used to program on -- a keypunch, a teletype, and a DEC VT-100 terminal. Along the way I explained how the features of the languages changed. I was also able to find a facsimile of Edsgar Dijkstra's famous "GOTO Considered Harmful" letter to the Communications of the ACM. I have no idea whether the students enjoyed it or not, but I did.
That evening I had dinner with one of DeVry's brightest stars. Dorothy Phoenix already has a degree from MIT (!) but she didn't learn as much as she wanted there about games, so she decided to get a second degree in the Games and Simulation Programming program at DeVry. We've exchanged E-mail several times on the subject of female players and women in games, so it was nice to get a chance to really talk to her for a couple of hours. Remember that name, folks; Dorothy Phoenix is someone we'll be seeing more of.
May 17
Saturday was the big recruiting event, when DeVry has an open house for prospective students and their parents. I gave an off-the-cuff talk on the game industry and its future in the morning, had a brief interview with a visiting urban radio station, and then gave a game design workshop in the afternoon. It was very well attended and I was pleased that I managed to persuade several of the parents to take part as well. One of the game ideas I handed out was a favorite -- help slaves escape along the Underground Railroad -- and the team did a particularly good job of combining the associated challenge with a storyline.
May 18
My flight didn't leave until evening, so I had most of the day free. I decided to spend it at the Udvar-Hazy Center, a branch of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum not far from Dulles Airport. I took in an IMAX film, Fighter Pilot: Operation Red Flag, which included breathtaking footage of the Red Flag training exercises in the Nevada desert, and then just wandered around looking at all the aircraft. They had an SR-71 Blackbird, the fastest plane that ever flew; the prototype for the Boeing 707, a plane I practically grew up in; MiGs from the Korean War; and then of course there's this:
The Enterprise was named following a long letter-writing campaign from Star Trek fans, well before the TV series was revived in the 1980s. Technically, it isn't a space shuttle at all. It did fly, but it never went into space. The rocket nozzles are mockups and the heat-shield tiles are fakes. Enterprise is a test vehicle to determine the aerodynamic characteristics of the shuttle design. They would take it up on the back of a 747, then turn it loose and see how it flew. ("Like a brick" is the general consensus.) The Enterprise was supposed to be refitted into a fully-spacegoing vehicle, but changes to the design made that too costly. Anyway it was great to see it up close.
May 19
And so home. On the way I got to try out United's new lie-flat business class seats. Definitely an improvement on the old ones, although if you're not really sleepy, you still aren't going to get much sleep on a six-hour flight. But they're a lot more comfortable and they have a real 110v power outlet!
May 13
Having completed my visit to RIT in Rochester, New York, I headed to Arlington, Virginia for three days of events at DeVry. I had been there before and enjoyed it a lot -- some of the best students I ever encountered. Although the events went well, the trip started badly when I got to my hotel and found that my booking had mysteriously disappeared. Someone, somewhere, had cancelled it and there were no other hotel rooms to be found in or near Arlington. I ran up a $140 cab fare driving around trying to find one. Even American Express Global Assist was unable to help me. They came to my rescue when I lost my wallet in Zurich, on the way to Santiago, Chile; but in this case they were distinctly disappointing. They found me one hotel room which turned out to be in Richmond, close to a hundred miles away, and when I called back to ask for something else, they found me another one in Arlington, Texas. After that I gave up and slept on the floor of Washington National Airport, as one place where I knew I could stay and be safe, and find transportation in the morning. It was a frustrating and thoroughly uncomfortable time, especially as the airport played loud music all night, presumably to discourage people like me from sleeping there.May 14
At about 7:30 AM I called Hilton's national reservations number and discovered that, mirabile dictu, my original hotel had rooms available for the next four nights. I caught their shuttle and went blearily back to the place I had started 10 hours before, where the desk staff were kind enough to hurry up the cleaning process and get me a room by 9:30 AM. Check-in time is normally 3 PM, so this was a lucky break. I was supposed to have the 14th free to be a tourist, but in the event I spent the whole day sleeping.
May 15
My first day at the DeVry campus; I went over in the early afternoon and had a chat with the professors, then gave a lecture on job-hunting to the current students while they ate pizza. That evening I went back to my hotel room and cooked up an impromptu lecture on the history of computer programming.
May 16
In the morning I gave the students a game design workshop, then delivered my lecture on programming. I had been asked to address in a class on "why we do object-oriented programming," and I thought it would be fun to start with Ada, Lady Lovelace's program for the Analytical Engine and then work my way forward through FORTRAN, BASIC, Pascal, and finally C++, with examples of code and pictures of some of the old gear that I used to program on -- a keypunch, a teletype, and a DEC VT-100 terminal. Along the way I explained how the features of the languages changed. I was also able to find a facsimile of Edsgar Dijkstra's famous "GOTO Considered Harmful" letter to the Communications of the ACM. I have no idea whether the students enjoyed it or not, but I did.
That evening I had dinner with one of DeVry's brightest stars. Dorothy Phoenix already has a degree from MIT (!) but she didn't learn as much as she wanted there about games, so she decided to get a second degree in the Games and Simulation Programming program at DeVry. We've exchanged E-mail several times on the subject of female players and women in games, so it was nice to get a chance to really talk to her for a couple of hours. Remember that name, folks; Dorothy Phoenix is someone we'll be seeing more of.
May 17
Saturday was the big recruiting event, when DeVry has an open house for prospective students and their parents. I gave an off-the-cuff talk on the game industry and its future in the morning, had a brief interview with a visiting urban radio station, and then gave a game design workshop in the afternoon. It was very well attended and I was pleased that I managed to persuade several of the parents to take part as well. One of the game ideas I handed out was a favorite -- help slaves escape along the Underground Railroad -- and the team did a particularly good job of combining the associated challenge with a storyline.
May 18
My flight didn't leave until evening, so I had most of the day free. I decided to spend it at the Udvar-Hazy Center, a branch of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum not far from Dulles Airport. I took in an IMAX film, Fighter Pilot: Operation Red Flag, which included breathtaking footage of the Red Flag training exercises in the Nevada desert, and then just wandered around looking at all the aircraft. They had an SR-71 Blackbird, the fastest plane that ever flew; the prototype for the Boeing 707, a plane I practically grew up in; MiGs from the Korean War; and then of course there's this:
The Enterprise was named following a long letter-writing campaign from Star Trek fans, well before the TV series was revived in the 1980s. Technically, it isn't a space shuttle at all. It did fly, but it never went into space. The rocket nozzles are mockups and the heat-shield tiles are fakes. Enterprise is a test vehicle to determine the aerodynamic characteristics of the shuttle design. They would take it up on the back of a 747, then turn it loose and see how it flew. ("Like a brick" is the general consensus.) The Enterprise was supposed to be refitted into a fully-spacegoing vehicle, but changes to the design made that too costly. Anyway it was great to see it up close.
May 19
And so home. On the way I got to try out United's new lie-flat business class seats. Definitely an improvement on the old ones, although if you're not really sleepy, you still aren't going to get much sleep on a six-hour flight. But they're a lot more comfortable and they have a real 110v power outlet!
<< Home