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Howard Students Team Up for Roast and Toast Gaming Event

 

A mixture of Howard University computer science and journalism students filled screening room west in Howard’s School of Communications Friday for a new gaming event Roast and Toast 2.

Roast and Toast 2 was an event organized by students enrolled in the Computer Science Game Engine Program and School of Communication news game directed study.  The students kicked off the event by demonstrating the much anticipated Star Wars Kinect game, “The Elder Scroll V: Skyrim.”

Using motion controls students played a few minutes into the game and then gave an on camera critique about what they thought about it.  

“We review games on video that are later posted online to give an African-American perspective on games,” said senior broadcast journalism major, Denise Sawyer.  “We want to show that we are not just consumers but we know enough to critique and analyze the product.”

After the critiques, Sawyer and other students involved in the program showcased the games they created during the semester.

The students in the directed study showcased a game that was created to teach students AP style. The multiple choice game put a fun twist on learning the writing style used by most journalists.

The AP style game was created using a free online game coding platform called Scratch that allows users to create an online game without having to use any coding language.

Although the journalism students used Scratch, the computer science students created the game “Collect 2 Protect”, a Windows PC game to save the world from carbon induced global warming, without the help of a program but used a C sharp coding language.

The event ended in a fun and funky way when the students convinced their professors Todd Shurn Ph.D and Ingrid Sturgis to play the motion controlled dance game “Dance Central 2.”

Shurn and Sturgis battled it out to Kurtis Blow “The Breaks.” After taking an early lead with some creative dance moves, Sturgis lost to Shurn after he came back with a continuous arm move that stole the show.

Roast and Toast 2 was an exciting event that brought students from different concentrations together. But its overall purpose is to get Howard University students prepared to take on the billion dollar gaming industry.

“Interactive media market is growing explosively,” said Shurn. “Students from Stanford, Harvard, USC, and Carnegie Mellon are launching successful media companies after graduation and we want to assist Howard University students to create innovative products enabling to do the same.”