Carnival and Avatar Launch!

The Get in Line team recently took part in the on-campus launch for The Spring 2009 Carnival at Carnegie Mellon University. The theme was revealed for this year - which is Epic Adventures - and the Get in Line inclusion to Carnival was also announced.

Guests visiting the event could make their avatars for Carnival right there with the help of Get in Line team members. We had dozens of people sign up and even more take information home to share with their friends! Not only do people have some pretty sweet avatars, they are also super excited for Carnival and the games that are going to be featured!

Look below at some of the guests we had sign up for avatars!

Lots of guests signing up and making avatars for Carnival!

Natasha showing someone the robot builder

Andy and Carlos showing guests how their newly-created avatars will appear in the games at Carnival

Kana explaining the process to a guest

Get in Line presents at ETC Half-Semester presentations

The Get in Line team just finished their half presentations at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center, where they not only detailed the work they’ve accomplished thus far, but also showing what’s to come. The team received some great questions and feedback and is excited to continue on with carnival!

Look for the video in the coming days.

Get in Line team members visit SxSW!

This past weekend, Josh and Kana from Get in Line traveled to Austin, TX to visit the South by Southwest Conference, a week-long event featuring independent films, music and interactive technologies. In addition to having a great time (and seeing some sweet movie premiers!) the team spread the word about Get in Line, receiving some great feedback and a whole new slew of followers.

Yee-haw!

Girls invade the Get in Line team!

On March 2nd, 29 girls invaded the Get in Line team project room for Girl Tech Night at the ETC - but in a good way!

According to their website, Creative Technology Nights for Girls focuses on exposing middle school girls to various creative technologies with the hopes of engaging the next generation of women in technology. We had 22 girls plus 7 from the Western PA School for the Deaf, 3 translator/teachers, 5 Tech Night volunteers, plus Carol and Mary - program facilitators.

Our guests played the Get in Line games, mostly with their own phones, and had a great time! One team even demanded a rematch on one of the games!

The girls from the School for the Deaf were also able to play because our games (luckily) had sufficient explanations built into the gameplay, so they did not need our sound queues. (Adding this to the checklist of playtesting to make games even MORE accessible to all…)

The ETC received a lovely letter from Mary, the facilitator of Girl Tech Night!

excerpt:
“The girls really enjoyed the “Get in Line” games–a big thank you to Tracy, Carlos, Chris and Andrew for hosting them to play.”

Well - we enjoyed having them here too! Nothing beats watching people have fun playing something that you have built! Check their site out at http://women.cs.cmu.edu/technights/.

Get in Line team travels to Harrisburg University

The team traveled out to Harrisburg Univeristy’s brand new academic building this week to share our project with the students!

It was a great opportunity to share what we’re doing with a new audience (mostly computer science people, so we were pretty popular), as well as catch up with Charles Palmer, faculty member at Harrisburg and friend of the team!

The trip was a great success, and we stayed to enjoy the great festivities of the building dedication that evening.

Charles, Josh, Tracy and Chris at the Dedication Ceremony Reception