I was at the Ontario Universities’ Fair where all the universities have booths and thousands of high-school kids come through with their parents to shop for programs. After I had done my turn at the McMaster booth I took my son around to find a program that combines computing with arts or game design. Here is what we found.
The University of Ontario Institute of Technology is an innovative and market-oriented institution, pursuing inquiry, discovery and application through excellence in teaching and learning, value-added research and vibrant student life.
(UOIT Vision)
The new University of Ontario Insitute of Technology has a program that will start in 2005 on Game Development and Entrepreneurship (See futureinmind@uoit.) Ministry approval is pending and it doesn’t sound like they have recruited faculty yet for this. What my son liked was that the program would be limited to cohorts of about 50 students. He also liked the Mobile Learning or laptop program (which I found expensive at $1,480 a year for full-time students).
My son was not impressed by the University of Waterloo School of Computer Science. The person we talked to admitted that class sizes in first year were large and didn’t seem to know of any arts component other than computer graphics courses (which often are not about digital art, but are about algorithms for trees.) Their COOP program, however, sounds impressive.
We were both intrigued by the folks at University of Guelph. They have three different programs, a Bachelor of Computing (and Information Science), a Bachelor of Arts in Computing and a Bachelor of Science in Computing. The BA lets you combine computing with arts and humanities while the BSc allows you to combine computing with science like biolology. They are, in effect, applied computing programs. They also have a COOP program.
In a previous entry on What happens to dead universities? I wrote about the Simon Fraser Interactive Arts program. This program is actually one of a number of innovative ones at their new Surrey campus.