Interactive Media, M.F.A.

For a complete list of courses, please visit the UM Bulletin website at http://bulletin.miami.edu

Advanced Systems: Designing Playful Experiences

Building on their systems foundation from the Intro to Systems course, students will continue to play and analyze games along with designing games in order to build a more extensive vocabulary and toolkit to both understand and design interactive systems. Students will be exposed to a range of popular game prototyping technologies (for example: Twine, GameSalad, ARIS) and will create several mini projects as well as one final game project created using the platform of their choice. Students will explore a different core game mechanic with each prototyping tool thus broadening their ability to create targeted meaning within a playful experience.

Building Interfaces

This course covers the production concepts and techniques to design and develop dynamic graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for web applications. Students will develop competency with several key technologies used in web development and providing them with the skills and principles needed to make effective use of these technologies.

Dynamic Data

This course focuses on speaking through computer programming and data. Students will learn to build stories using numerical data or databases as a primary material and explore data as content. For this course students will be required to build custom software solutions through web programming languages that utilize third party APIs to interpret, analyze and manipulate data.

Game Development Studio

This course is a project-based course devoted to developing a game. In groups, students will start with a concept and create prototypes that will be refined through multiple iterations and playtests. Your final game will either be a well-polished non-digital game or digital game.

Programming for Designers

This course will teach students the basics of programming using Processing. Processing is a language created by Ben Fry and Casey Reas of MIT. It was created to make computer programming accessible to people who might imagine it but do not always have the skills to execute it, thus making it an excellent tool to teach programing concepts to designers. Processing gives students immediate results allowing them to easily create beautiful, interactive graphics.