VMASC CAMPERS DEMONSTRATE VIDEO GAME AND ROBOT CREATIONS
"This is one of the craziest things you're ever going to see," a confident Rori Domino declared.
The precocious 14-year-old Rosemont Academy student was about to unveil the video game he had created at the Intermediate Game Development Camp hosted by Old Dominion's Virginia Modeling, Analysis and Simulation Center (VMASC).
Domino was one of 12 aspiring video game designers, plus another four campers who participated in VMASC's inaugural Robotics Camp who showed off their creations to their parents, ODU staff and faculty - and to each other - at the end of their weeklong camps.
Domino's game, a version of the popular game Tank War that features pigs trying to take over the world, played on the large screen in the auditorium of the E.V. Williams Engineering and Computational Sciences Building, as he talked the audience through the rules of the shoot-'em-up game.
Each of the five-minute presentations featured ingenious twists of standard video game designs by the young scientists. Games such as Galactic Mail, Tank War and Wingman Sam had a familiar look, but each took on the personality of its young, bright creator.
Yuzhong Shen, associate professor in ODU's Department of Modeling, Simulation and Visualization, one of the instructors for the VMASC game development camp, told the audience about the growth potential of video game design as a career, with salaries averaging $90,000 per year. Also, Shen said: "Modeling and simulation has much overlap with the gaming industry."
VMASC has run the camps every summer for several years, but this is the first time that the product developed by the campers was demonstrated before an audience. This year's VMASC summer camps also included, for the first time, a robotics camp. Pre-teen and teenage students built their own robots, under the guidance of Yiannis Papelis, research professor of virtual environments at VMASC, and showed off their bells and whistles to the crowd at the reception.
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