<p>Does anyone have experience with the Computer Game Development Academy - Summer Enrichment Program?</p>
<p>Yes, but only with the 2006 incarnation of the thing. Feel free to ask any questions you might have.</p>
<p>So first year…hard to judge a program during its first year, but I will take that into consideration.</p>
<p>Worthwhile program? Would you recommend the program? Did you gain any new experiences? Were you able to create a portfolio with what you created? What would you have changed? Were the attendees only from local areas of Troy? Were there nightly activities? Did attending the summer program persuade you to attend RPI as an undergraduate? Do you think attending the program positively affected your application to attend RPI as an undergrad? Anything else about the program you feel is important to share please do. Thanks…</p>
<p>That’s a lot of questions! Let’s see what I remember…</p>
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<p>For me, I think so. If you stalk me hard enough, you might be able to find out that I wasn’t a very serious student in high school until my senior year. I think this program, which for the first time provided me with interaction with other programmers my age, reminded me that there’s still a lot I can do to improve myself, and that one step to doing so involves impressing the right undergraduate admissions officers. Perhaps I’m just retroactively justifying wasting most of a summer internship’s worth of money on a two week program, but in some sense I feel like I’m still riding the wave that was started back then in my current postgraduate academic pursuits.</p>
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I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this program in particular, but if you’re similar to my younger self I would strongly recommend you do something that would both be enjoyable and allow you to interact with other scientifically-minded peers your age. There are plenty of other programs at other universities that might also have these qualities, so don’t forget to examine those options, too.</p>
<p>That said, Marc Destefano is an excellent instructor, and you can’t really go wrong attending his summer academy (assuming he’s still the one running it).</p>
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<p>It was my first time living away from home, and the first time I interacted with other students my age whose programming ability went beyond simple counting for-loops. The first was nice as a prep for college since I had some idea what I was going into freshman year, and the second I think was very influential in my mindset as I mentioned earlier. What I learned about game development was almost entirely secondary, and I think I made use of my acquired pygame knowledge only once since (and not for game development).</p>
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<p>I didn’t end up applying for anything that requested a portfolio, so I can’t really answer this question. I imagine I could have used it for something, but to be honest I’m somewhat ashamed of my code my teammate and I wrote back then and would certainly rewrite the entire game engine before I’d let a game development recruiter look at our code (the game itself was pretty cute, though).</p>
<p>That said, coding style is simply a programming maturity thing, and I don’t think there’s a good way of skipping directly into writing good code without truly understanding <em>why</em> it is you are avoiding certain practices.</p>
<p>If you’re interested, you can find the final game my group made, as well as the unfortunate code, at [this</a> link](<a href=“http://www.cogsci.rpi.edu/public_html/destem/summeracademy/]this”>http://www.cogsci.rpi.edu/public_html/destem/summeracademy/) under the name “Orbital”. (If you want to run this via python as opposed to by running the .exe, you might need to lowercase the extension on tempbullet2.PNG in the graphics folder). I do recommend you slightly turn down your volume before starting. Please don’t ask about the insane file size or why you can’t actually enter orbit in a game called Orbital :P.</p>
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<p>In the program itself? Interesting question… I would have perhaps gone a bit more into the theory of game development (what subtleties make a game enjoyable, what structures should you use to store state, etc.) rather than python trivia such as immutability of certain objects, but overall I think it was pretty well-designed.</p>
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<p>No. I’m from the Boston area, and there were at least two others from there as well. There was also at least one guy from Texas, one from Rochester, and one from Ohio. Besides those and two locals, I don’t know where the rest of the 14ish attendees came from.</p>
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<p>I think there were activities on some, but not every, night (maybe around 50%?). I know we watched Sin City at one point, had a campus tour / treasure hunt hybrid on another, and played some team-based Jeopardy a third night, but don’t remember what we did the other times. We had at least one LAN party (featuring the most intense Brood War game I’ve ever played) at some point, but I think that was on a Sunday during the afternoon.</p>
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<p>It certainly helped. Before attending, I think my undergraduate preference order went CMU > Cornell > Columbia > UIUC > RPI > (others). After attending, RPI definitely overtook UIUC, and ended up roughly tied with Columbia (Cornell later ended up dropping way down on the list for other unrelated reasons). </p>
<p>The main thing was that it cleared up the unfounded suspicion that perhaps because RPI students had (on average) weaker test scores than some of the other schools on my list, I wouldn’t be able to talented academic peers from whom I can learn as an undergrad. Interacting with some of the then-current students completely wiped out this false belief, and I’m now very grateful that I eventually had the opportunity to meet and work with the students there – some of whom are now my closest friends with whom I still hold mathematically stimulating conversations on a near-daily basis.</p>
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<p>I have no idea whether there is any interaction between the instructors of this program and the admissions officers. What I do know is that I had a good relationship with the instructor and ended up getting perhaps too big of a scholarship for my admittedly-weak high school credentials (3.3ish UW GPA at the time of applying, I think, without much dedication to anything outside of chess and community service as my ECs). Whether the merit aid was due to some strong showings senior year or a result of some recommendation from the summer program I don’t really know.</p>
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<p>At least one person ended up homesick during the program and dropped out only a couple days in. If you think this could happen to you, perhaps it would be better to look for a local program if you’re not from the Albany area. </p>
<p>Also, BRING A LAPTOP. I was under the impression that they will offer loaner laptops for students in the program. This didn’t end up happening, which both prevented me from working on the project outside of normal hours and negatively affected the computer-centric socializing during the couple of weeks I was there. If you don’t have a laptop, either borrow one, get one, or rent one from a place like Rent-A-Center. There’s no point in damaging your $3000 experience to save paying the ~$75 you’d spent renting a laptop for two weeks.</p>
<p>Thanks for the thoughtful and detailed response. I will share with my son.</p>
<p>Anyone with any recent experience with this summer program?</p>
<p>bump 10char</p>
<p>anyone attending summer 2013?</p>