The second week of my internship at the MIX Center in Mesa, AZ was a blast, but also exhausting. The week started somewhat slow, with introductions on Monday, and time for the kids to get used to us, and vice versa. We can’t let them really be alone, but our base of operations is on the second floor, so over the course of this week, I got so many steps in running the kids up and down from check-in and similar. My legs hurt.
In order to open up the idea of game development and modification to these students, days one and two contained an activity involving modifying a simple Candyland-style board game.
This was a great activity for them to understand very basic concepts of game design and concepts, and it was a great activity for the staff to see the types of kids and groups that were going to be forming.
Each day at camp is divided into the morning curriculum and after-care. The morning curriculum was mostly the same every day this week, with some kids progressing into other software relatively fast, and I feel like I’ve really been able to contribute to and connect with some of the kids. As much fun as the mornings have been, I’ve really been spreading my wings during the after-care with a coworker. We as a team decided that we wanted more enrichment after lunch, and not to have them on their phones for four hours, so this coworker and I came up with some ideas involving getting the students to create their own short films using motion capture. On the first day, we had them create a character up on the whiteboard:
Our class’ character, AAAHHG/HH
We then had one of the kids act out how this character should move, and used AI motion capture to translate his movements to this character. This was a great exercise for me because I haven’t experimented with very much motion capture before.
The rest of the week went similarly, and I’m exhausted from being on my feet so much.
On the home front, I’ve been having a great time playing games and watching shows with my grandparents, but there hasn’t been too much other than that. I can’t go outside and do anything in this town with it being perpetually 90-115 degrees.
I’m excited to see where this next week takes me!
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